Abbey Travel informed people that a 1,600 day-trip to see Liverpool against AC Milan in Greece was being cancelled just 48 hours before the match was due to kick off.

The owner of the company, Con Horgan, said the trip was being abandoned because there was a difficulty booking a landing slot at Athens airport.

Most of those affected realised that they would not make it to Greece only after Joe Duffy discussed the issue on his RTE radio show Liveline two days before the match on 23 May.

Horgan said the cancellation was beyond his control but he refused to supply people who wanted to make their own way to Athens with match tickets. This led to people accusing Horgan of cancelling the trip because of a lack of tickets.

He denied this, but Co Offaly travel agent Tony Bernie had to be protected by local police after informing customers on the day of the match that his ticket allocation had fallen through.

Letters from Abbey Travel began arriving to people late last week.

The letter apologised but said that the blame lay with the Greek authorities for not being prepared for the volume of air traffic.

It concluded by offering a discount of 50 per person off the next trip booked with the travel company.

One angry customer who had his trip cancelled said: "As far as I'm concerned I will never travel with Abbey again.

They can keep their 50. I heard that this trip of a lifetime was cancelled when I tuned in to listen to Joe Duffy.

"I was bringing my children on this trip and they were being called liars in school by their friends when they couldn't go." Con Horgan failed to return phone calls last week.

In a statement on his company's website, Tony Bernie, managing director of Bernie Travel in Tullamore, apologised for his customers' problems with tickets.

"We had our tickets ordered from a reputable agent in Athens and when it came to receiving them we were informed that they were unavailable for us, " he said. "It now seems that the company in question resold our tickets at a higher price even though we had paid a holding deposit for them."