Hebron, Ky. ? Days of bad weather, a computer malfunction and sick airline employees put tens of thousands of travelers in holiday limbo Saturday, with Comair canceling all its flights and US Airways trying to reconnect thousands of pieces of luggage with their owners.

Throngs of waiting passengers milled about at Comair’s hub at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. At Philadelphia International Airport, several hundred people stood in long lines at sparsely staffed US Airways check-in counters.

Cynthia Mayer, waiting to return home to Hilton Head, S.C., on a Comair flight from Cincinnati, lost both her flight and her luggage, and said her earliest flight home would be late Monday night.

“They offered me a toothbrush, a kit with a toothpaste and a toothbrush,” Mayer said.

Comair, a Delta Air Lines subsidiary, canceled all its 1,100 flights Saturday because computer problems knocked out its system that manages flight assignments, company spokesman Nick Miller said. The cancellations affected 30,000 travelers in 118 cities, he said.

Miller said Comair planned to have limited flights today. Officials had not decided which flights or when the planes would begin to take off, he said late Saturday.

The problem was triggered in part by flights canceled Thursday and Friday because of a winter storm that hit Ohio particularly hard, Miller said. The airline had canceled most of its Thursday flights after it ran critically low on de-icer fluid.

“There was a cumulative effect with the canceled flights and trying to get crew assigned that caused the system to be overwhelmed,” he said. “It just stopped operating.”

US Airways, meanwhile, had passengers and thousands of pieces of luggage stranded at Philadelphia International Airport for the third day in a row.

John Price watched Saturday as airport workers sorted piles of unclaimed bags, none of them the suitcase full of presents for relatives he had checked Friday on his Phoenix-to-Philadelphia flight.

“I can’t show up empty-handed. That just doesn’t cut it,” he said.

The airline blamed the canceled flights, including 143 on Saturday, and baggage backups on severe weather Thursday compounded by record numbers of employees calling in sick, according to a company statement.