The budget airline easyJet has agreed to pay nearly £1,750 compensation to a family who were stranded in the Canary Islands after their flight home was cancelled.

Nicola and Robert Starkie had been to a friend’s wedding with their two young daughters. When they arrived at the airport in Las Palmas on Grand Canary after their week-long break they were told that the pilot had forgotten to renew his licence to fly.

The couple and four other relatives were among 25 passengers who could not be placed on the next available flight. They were told that they would have to wait five days for a flight home and even then could not be guaranteed a seat.

To add insult to injury the airline told them it would pay for hotel accommodation for only two nights, leaving them to fend for themselves.

The Starkies, who were about to move house and had already had to take two days’ unpaid leave, found seats on a flight to Bristol with another carrier, at a cost of £400.

When they complained to easyJet they were initially told that they had no right to compensation beyond a refund on their tickets. It was only after the family went to their local newspaper that easyJet relented, offering them the full reimbursement to which they were entitled under EU rules.

Mrs Starkie, 31, who is five months pregnant, said: “It was a very traumatic way to end the holiday. I spent two days crying; easyJet just dumped us there and left us. It is absolutely diabolical. We felt abandoned.”

The Starkies, who live in Bristol, flew to Grand Canary on July 22 with their daughters Liberty, 3, and Megan, 6, for the wedding of a family friend, Stuart Matthews. When they went to check in for the return flight on July 28 they were told it was cancelled.

Mrs Starkie said: “It was 11.45pm when we found out that we weren’t going home because the pilot wasn’t allowed to fly. There was a flight on Wednesday but there were no seats for us. We were told we might be able to get home on the Saturday flight, even though there was no guarantee.

“We needed to get home as we are moving house. We’d already lost our wages from the days of work we missed, because we were forced to take unpaid leave.” Yesterday, easyJet apologised for the “administration error” that led to the grounding of its return flight. It confirmed that the pilot’s licence had expired, but said that it was not easyJet’s responsibility.

The airline confirmed that the family would receive compensation estimated at £1,743. This includes €400 per passenger compensation under EU guidelines, £400 in flight costs and £75 for the hotel room.

For the past two years, budget airlines have been required to compensate passengers whose flights are cancelled. The EU compensation scheme, however, includes a clause that exempts them in the case of extraordinary circumstances, which can include bad weather, technical problems or if the flight is cancelled for reasons of security. Ryanair is to cancel thousands of tickets booked through third-party price comparison websites from Monday. Passengers who buy Ryanair tickets through such websites from next week will be turned away at the check-in desk.

The consumer magazine Which? accused the airline of using passengers as pawns.

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