Spanish Home Office says it is drafting in extra police for passport controls. | Majorca Daily Bulletin reporter

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Problems at passport control does not appear to be only happening in Palma but at other key airports across Spain.

Today, the Spanish Interior Minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, said that extra police are being deployed to ease the chaos.

It appears that there are serious problems in Madrid, where some 15,000 people have lost connecting flights due to a lack of personnel and long queues, as well as in Barcelona, Alicante, Malaga and Palma.

However, central government maintains that it is dealing with the situation and that it has already launched its annual plan to handle a spike in passengers at key moments.

A source for the Home Office said that at Easter, for example, extra staff were laid on at passport control and the main airport to handle the increase in passengers and similar measures are being taken this summer.

However, today there were fresh calls from the Spanish tourist industry for extra National Police and Guardia Civil to be deployed to key airports as quickly as possible because, as the industry pointed out to the Home Office, the need for British tourists to have their passports stamped on entry and departure is slowing the process down even more and damaging the country’s image.

And, the outlook is similar in the UK.

Continuing airport chaos is still affecting thousands of British travellers with more widespread flight cancellations after a weekend of chaos.

Today, easyJet cancelled at least 50 flights with London’s Gatwick airport worst affected. Wizz Air scrapped at least seven too and British Airways has cancelled 124 flights from Heathrow.

At the end of the half-term holiday and a four day weekend, many families were due to return home this week. But over the weekend almost 200 flights into UK airports were cancelled from airlines including easyJet, British Airways and Wizz Air leaving passengers stuck abroad.

After many travellers ended up stranded at airports across Europe on Monday, EasyJet scrapped 37 more flights.

British Airways also axed more than 100 short-haul flights, stressing that passengers affected were given advanced notice as these were part of a schedule reduction in place until October.