In Florida, 266 British holidaymakers were belted into their seats and ready to fly home to Manchester. They had no idea, as their jet left its gate at Orlando airport early yesterday, of the frantic negotiations on the other side of the Atlantic that had just led to Britain’s third-largest tour operator sliding into administration.

Nor did the thousands of would-be tourists who were about to wake up in Britain on the day they thought that they were setting off on dream holidays and honeymoons.

Then, at the last minute, the news of XL’s demise reached Florida and the aircraft, like the company’s entire fleet, was grounded.

Last night 85,000 Britons were stranded at holiday destinations around the world, trying to find an alternative way home.

The Gillett family from Romford, Essex, were enjoying their last breakfast in Marmaris, Turkey, yesterday when they heard on the television news that they were stranded.

“I immediately rang the emergency number that flashed on to the screen and was told by a recorded message that I was 80th in the queue,” said Clare, 24, on holiday with her parents and boyfriend.

“I held for ages until one of the waiters told me it costs over £2 a minute to phone the UK from Turkey. I slammed the phone down but reckon it had already cost me more than the price of the XL flight.”

After abandoning that option, she found other flights — at a cost of £160 and a £100 taxi to Bodrum.

Others will have a much longer wait to get back to Britain, while many more were left searching for ways to head abroad, desperate to reach their intended destination.

At airports around the country there was anger and frustration. In Glasgow, Beatrice and Steve Barker found that their flight had been grounded only after paying £140 for a taxi to take them from Dundee.

In Manchester, where the Penman family’s trip of a lifetime to the USA was in tatters after two years of saving, younger members of the party were in tears. At Gatwick, where the South Terminal is entered through a corridor lined with XL posters proclaiming “Your Holiday Starts Here”, hundreds queued to be told that this was no longer true.

The lucky ones who could find places on alternative flights snapped them up, sometimes at a four-figure cost, while others shouted expletives or returned to the airport hotel where they had spent the night and “hit the bar”, regardless of it being 9am.

David Douse, from Salisbury, Wiltshire, was a little more stoic, even though his fortieth wedding anniversary plans had been thrown into disarray. The 61-year-old and his wife, Grace, had spent £1,700 on a trip to Pelion, Greece, to celebrate the occasion. Asked how his wife was bearing up, he took a deep breath before responding: “She’s a little more dejected than me but that’s how we have survived 40 years of marriage. We bounce off each other – when I’m down she lifts me.”

Valerie Ford, in the same queue with her wheelchair-bound mother and four other family members, was worried about her son.

“We were going to Tenerife for a week and he decided to come at the last minute,” the 48-year-old said.

“He flew out with First Choice so now he’s out there by himself. He’s going into the Navy so it was going to be the last holiday we’ll all have with him for a while.”

On Thursday night, XL’s website was open for bookings. But in the early hours of Friday an official note appeared on the site saying that the company was no more.

The end was so abrupt that staff on some of the last XL flights to take off lost their jobs in effect while in the air. Spencer Davis, a cabin-crew member on the flight that landed at Gatwick from Hurghada, Egypt, at 4.20am yesterday had “an inkling” before take off that something was “very wrong”.

“By the time we touched down, we knew that our worst fears were true. We were met by the authorities and were taken under their control.”

About 1,400 of XL’s 1,700 staff received similarly grim news yesterday.

Some went to the company’s headquarters in Crawley, West Sussex, at 9.15am, where people hugged on learning that they were suddenly no longer colleagues. Others held an informal 2am meeting at Gatwick after picking up information from text messages and the internet.

Hours later, at the Hilton hotel, Gatwick, Phil Wyatt, the group chief executive of XL, fought back tears as he apologised to customers and blamed soaring oil prices — which have increased the company’s fuel bill by $82 million (£45.8 million) year on year — for the collapse of his business.

“Many people have been making hay with high oil prices,” Mr Wyatt said. “This is the repercussion of that hay: 1,700 people out of work, potentially, in the UK.”

He praised his loyal staff — some of whom are also stranded around the world, according to posts on the pilots’ discussion website PPRuNe — and said he was “totally devastated” that he had not been able to stave off administration.

“I have been in this business since I was 16 years old and I can assure you that I am not going to let big companies dominate this business,” he said.

If XL cannot brave the economic weather, however, it remains to be seen whether anyone but the travel giants will see it through.

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