Thousands of travelers cope with holiday headaches
Comair grounded for weekend; US Airways deals with lost bags
 |  Stacy Tornatore rests at the Philadelphia airport after her flight to Denver was rescheduled for Monday. |
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 Stranded amid canceled flights and lost luggage.
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(CNN) -- Tens of thousands of travelers spent Christmas in an airport, as Comair canceled all of its flights and many US Airways passengers waited to be reunited with their luggage.
Comair, which flies an average of 30,000 people per day, called off all 1,160 daily flights for both Saturday and Sunday. It will resume a limited schedule Monday, Comair spokesman Don Bornhorst said.
The computer system Comair uses to book pilots for flights broke down, he said.
Comair could not pinpoint a reason for the computer crash and could not say why there was no backup system.
There was "a lot of stress because of multiple changes going through the system," Bornhorst said.
That only exacerbated problems caused by severe weather this week for Comair, a Delta subsidiary that flies to 118 cities.
Many of the stranded passengers were at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, Comair's hub.
Some passengers have had to sleep at the airport, Bornhorst said.
Other travelers have been booked on Delta flights, bused to airports in other cities or given vouchers for nearby hotels, he said.
To make matters worse, many bags had been misplaced, he said.
One woman said she and her family had decided to drive from Cincinnati to Rochester, New York, for her daughter's baptism.
The family's first flight had been canceled, and a second booking was lost.
"We got here this morning and they didn't have our reservation. There's nobody to talk to," the woman said.
Trying to get on another flight would mean waiting in a five-hour line, she said.
Lost luggage and sick calls
US Airways said Saturday that so many travelers had been separated from their luggage that the company transferred bags between hubs by flying jets filled with suitcases.
"We had five aircraft fly from Philadelphia [Pennsylvania] to Charlotte [North Carolina] just carrying bags, no passengers, so that they could be sorted and returned to passengers," spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said.
"A confluence of issues" led to the problem, Kudwa said. In addition to severe weather across much of the country Thursday, large numbers of flight attendants and baggage handlers at Philadelphia International Airport called in sick Friday.
Kudwa did not say whether the sick calls -- a "record number," according to a notice on the company's Web site -- were part of an orchestrated effort by employees.
Teddy Xidas, president of Association of Flight Attendants Local 40 in Pittsburgh, told The Associated Press that the union had nothing to do with the sick calls.
"It's poor management planning, that's my opinion," Xidas said. "We have sick calls every single year around the holiday."
The company also experienced flight delays and cancellations Saturday.
"I've had four cancellations today," one traveler in Philadelphia said. "I've been run through five different gates, nobody's told me anything, and my flight was six hours ago."
Kudwa said the airline was working to resolve the problems.
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Associated Press contributed to this report.
