Airline loses wheelchair-using granny for 11 hours

A family is fuming mad after an airport worker parked a wheelchair-using grandmother in a departure lounge and an airline's "processing error" led her to be left there for up to 11 hours.

Alice Vaticano, 85, told a Denver TV station that one of her daughters took her to New Jersey's Newark Airport, where a skycap promised to wheel her directly to her gate.

Instead, she ended up in a corner, missing her flight and several others.

"She pushed me there and left me," Vaticano told KCNC-TV in Denver. "I was just sitting all day in a wheelchair."

Meanwhile, her daughter in Denver, who was due to meet her at the airport, was shocked when her mother did not emerge from the plane.

"Where was she?" Donna Vaticano told the TV station on Tuesday. "What happened to her? These are people's jobs. Who is supposed to be paying attention?"

The elder Vaticano, who suffers from diabetes, said she thought "I would sit in Newark forever." The skycap "pushed me there and left me," she added.

Airline officials were eventually alerted after Donna Vaticano complained and put the elderly woman on another flight.

"I want answers. What the heck happened?" she told the station.

The airline says a "processing error" at check-in did not alert employees at the gate to her special need, which is her use of a wheelchair. Southwest gave her two $200 in travel vouchers.

In a statement, Southwest said: "We've researched the details of this Denver customer's travel and can verify that she checked in for her flight at Newark Liberty International Airport two hours prior to her scheduled departure, but a processing error in that check-in process did not alert our employees at the gate to her special need (wheelchair) in boarding the aircraft."

In a statement provided to MailOnline Travel, the airline said it has "counseled" the skycap on its processes for customers who require special attention.