Travellers are set to face disruption throughout this week after staff absences saw EasyJet cancel more than 200 flights. 

The airline blamed the problems on high levels of sickness amid staff testing positive for Covid-19 after 222 trips were axed over the weekend. 

At least 62 flights have been cancelled by the airline today, with flights from Scotland also being affected by the travel chaos.  

EasyJet said it had made efforts to offset staff shortages by “rostering” additional standby crew on the weekend but was still forced to make additional cancellations over Sunday and Monday. 

An easyJet spokesperson said: “As a result of the current high rates of Covid infections across Europe, like all businesses easyJet is experiencing higher than usual levels of employee sickness.

“We have taken action to mitigate this through the rostering of additional standby crew this weekend, however, with the current levels of sickness we have also decided to make some cancellations in advance which were focused on consolidating flights where we have multiple frequencies so customers have more options to rebook their travel, often on the same day.

“Unfortunately it has been necessary to make some additional cancellations for today and tomorrow. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause to customers on affected flights.

“We have made 62 pre-emptive cancellations for flights to and from the UK for tomorrow which represents a small proportion of tomorrow’s total flying programme which was planned to be more than 1,645 flights.

“We cancelled the majority of these yesterday.”

It comes as many families set off to airports as the Easter holidays got under way, with long queues affecting some major airports such as Heathrow. 

The airport attributed the congestion to Covid checks required by destination countries and “high passenger volumes”.

But there were also reports of staff shortages and problems with the e-gate passport checkpoints as travellers took to social media to air their frustrations, with some saying they had waited hours to take off.

Other travellers said several of the automatic e-gates, staffed by Border Force and used to process passengers, were not operating properly.

The Home Office confirmed there had been a “technical issue” with the checkpoints which has since been resolved, and said the problem had not caused queues to exceed the “standard length” at Heathrow.

But a Heathrow spokesperson said: “Due to high passenger volumes and the Covid documentation checks still required by many end destinations, Terminal 2 departures has experienced some congestion today.

“Our teams are supporting our airline partners to get passengers away on their journeys as quickly as possible and we apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.”