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June 21, 2015, 11:38 AM GMT / Updated June 21, 2015, 9:16 PM GMT By Alastair Jamieson

LONDON — Almost 300 United Airlines passengers slept on an airport floor overnight after their flight from Rome to Chicago was diverted to Ireland to offload a disruptive passenger late Saturday.

Their ordeal began when Flight UA971 made an unscheduled landing in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where a passenger was arrested.

The Boeing 777 landed at 6.59 p.m. local time (1.59 p.m. ET) Saturday and was refueled but flight crew reached FAA working hour limits before the journey could resume.

With not enough local hotel rooms available, the 269 passengers were forced to spend the night in the terminal — the second time in a week that United customers have been left stranded because of a diversion.

The disruptive passenger, a 42-year-old dual American-Italian citizen, was later charged with endangering the safety of an aircraft, according to a statement from Belfast International Airport.

A passenger from Chicago, Billy Saviano, said the flight was finally supposed to leave the airport at 1 p.m. local time (8 a.m. ET) but that got delayed to 5:50 p.m. (12:50 p.m. ET) Sunday — 23 hours after they landed in the U.K. and some 24 hours after they left Italy.

Before they were allowed into the airport, the travelers had sat on the tarmac for five hours, Saviano said.

After they “missed takeoff by two minutes because of FAA regulations of pilot times,” Saviano said the United passengers were told “they were looking for hotels for us and that they called as far as Dublin."

But accommodations were apparently hard to come by and United “had us sleeping on the baggage claim floor and then moved us to departures," Saviano said. "They never sent us someone to explain what was going on."

Similar complaints were made last week when United customers flying from Chicago to London were diverted to Canada and housed overnight in military barracks.

Rick Sliter, 42, from San Diego, is traveling with his 70-year-old mom and two children, aged 8 and 10. He told NBC News that passengers had been given a $23 voucher for meals, later increased to $70, but that there were long lines at the terminal's limited cafes.

“The captain indicated that they had tried extremely hard and called multiple places but that there were not many hotel rooms available,” he said.