I was rather dismayed to read the article which appears as your lead on p8 with the byline of Paula Martins, which contained a major inaccuracy.

The story related to Faro airport’s inability to handle large numbers of arriving passengers, and went on to say that “The next day, on October 16, the situation was not repeated.” This is nonsense - we arrived on Saturday October 16 at 10am approximately, as did five other flights within a 30-minute window, discharging around 750 passengers into the terminal.

To say I was shocked would be an understatement. There was no social distancing whatsoever, people were being herded together like cattle into disorganised and unruly queues which the airport authorities had no control over whatsoever.

It took almost two hours to clear passport control and collect our cases, which were also delayed due to the fact that the luggage belts were full of cases belonging to passengers who were stuck in queues waiting to get through passport control.

So, to say that everything went well on Saturday is frankly erroneous and factually incorrect, and had your reporter been present at the airport she would have witnessed the disorganised chaos I had the misfortune of being stuck in, first hand.

And, this was not a one-off. On our return flight on October 31, we left our villa at 8am, arrived at the airport at 8.30am, and only reached our departure gate at 10.45am as the flight started boarding. We had a delayed departure due to the fact that passengers were still waiting to board due to, once again, the inability of Faro airport to cope with several departing flights at the same time.

We were in one queue after another. We joined a line of around 150 people at check-in for Jet2, then we waited in a larger queue at security, finally passing through that system only to be forced into yet another queue for passport control. This time I took two images to prove my points that in terms of Covid safety guidance of social distancing, there was none! This was a melting pot of hundreds of people crammed into small spaces - the perfect breeding ground for passing the Covid infection on to huge numbers of people.

I hope you will publish this report of what was a serious breach of safety guidance for the pandemic, and I will give some thought on whether to return to your gorgeous country, simply because of this experience at Faro airport.

John Maccines,

By email