Whe still thinks a lot about booking a one-way flight? It’s so easy: call up the booking form, enter the airport of departure and destination, select the cheapest offer and – click, it’s booked. However, there are more mistakes than you think. Again and again, travelers mix up airport names and end up in destinations they never intended to travel to.
The latest case: A young man who wanted to surprise his girlfriend with a trip to Budapest apparently didn’t look carefully when booking. Instead of the Ryanair flight to the Hungarian capital, he chose a flight to the Romanian capital Bucharest, 837 kilometers away. The couple at least kept their sense of humor and posted their oversight on TikTok. The end of the song: The two actually flew to the destination they had booked in error, only they could no longer cancel the hotel.
Mix-ups can be expensive. Perhaps the misguided couple finds comfort in knowing they are not alone with their problem. A particularly curious case occurred in the USA in February: a vacationer from New York booked a South Sea cruise from Sydney.
He booked the plane separately on the Internet and was happy about the supposed bargain price. The short flight time could have made him suspicious: instead of in Sydney, Australia, he landed in Sydney in the US state of Montana. Lucky in misfortune: A nice airline employee helped him to rebook both the flight and the cruise.
Many city names are more common in the world
From Paris, Texas to London, Ontario, virtually every major city in the world has a land airport somewhere out on the prairie. This opens the door to confusion. A classic mix-up is San José. That’s not just the name of Costa Rica’s capital, but also a town in California’s Silicon Valley.
That was recently a young Australian’s undoing. At least she noticed the $1,500 mistake when she landed in Denver. After 200 US dollars on the phone and 72 hours late, she finally came to the jungle trekking in a sweaty travel T-shirt – and 48 hours later her suitcase landed in the right San José.
The airport in Costa Rica’s capital, San José, is easily confused with that of the city of the same name in California
What: pa/imageBROKER/Manfred Bail
BHM instead of BHX: Airports are particularly easy to confuse because internationally they are abbreviated to three letters. And they are by no means always self-explanatory. In 2016, a couple from Birmingham, England (airport code BHX) booked two cheap tickets to Las Vegas, unaware that the departure airport was Birmingham, Alabama (airport code BHM).
The Canadian airports make it particularly easy to mix up airport abbreviations: They all start with a Y for reasons that are no longer really understandable.
Mix-ups when booking by phone
Internet bookings are tricky, but phone bookings are no less so, according to retired psychologist Lamenda Kingdon, who booked a flight to Granada in southern Spain over the phone. She landed 7,000 kilometers away on the Caribbean island of Grenada.
The airline paid for her onward flight to southern Spain – just like the American couple Sandy Valdiviseo (31) and Triet Vo (39), who wanted to visit a friend in Senegal’s capital Dakar, but ended up in Dhaka/Bangladesh instead of West Africa. The airline manager even apologized and added two free flights as compensation.
However, it is not always easy to get out of an airport mix-up. A woman with a strong Saxon accent who wanted to buy a ticket to Porto at the airport in Stuttgart had to find out. However, she pronounced the name of the Portuguese city so softly that she was issued a ticket to Bordeaux in France.
The woman from Saxony soon noticed the mistake and wanted her money back. However, she lost the trial before the Stuttgart district court. The judge explained that “an indistinctly spoken statement (…) is always at the expense of the explainer”.
If the city has more than one airport
Florence in South Carolina, Saint Petersburg in Florida, Edinburgh in the US state of Indiana and Dublin in California: Especially in the USA, numerous cosmopolitan cities have doppelgangers because the emigrants in the new country at least wanted to keep the familiar city names. But there are other ways to target the wrong airport – whenever a city has multiple airports.
Paris has two major airports: Orly and Charles de Gaulle, which, to make matters worse, is also called Roissy. There are three international airports in New York: John F. Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark. And London affords five: Heathrow, Stansted, Gatwick, Luton and London City.
This large number of airports regularly becomes problematic if you book a connecting flight and do not make sure that it should depart from the same airport. Exception: Both flights are on one ticket – then the airline is responsible for ensuring that the connection works.
Finally, a variant of airport confusion, which is more likely to be classified as a sham. It comes into play when low-cost airlines give their destinations their own names. Ryanair is notoriously known for this: They like to fly there from Frankfurt – and by that they don’t mean the Rhein-Main Airport, but the Hahn Airport in the Hunsrück, 120 kilometers away, which is officially called Frankfurt-Hahn Airport.
And Niederrhein Airport, which Ryanair calls Dusseldorf Weeze Airport, is located in Weeze, 80 kilometers from Dusseldorf. But that’s nothing compared to Paris-Vatry Airport: It’s located 160 kilometers from the French capital in the Champagne region. And the nearest train station is 25 kilometers away…
What to do if there is an error in the ticket
Anyone who discovers a booking error before the trip should not hesitate for a second and contact the airline’s telephone hotline (even better: a counter) instead of the website. Because you usually do not have the right to a free change.
However, sometimes the airline employees feel sorry and help. Above all, they also know the rules: With Lufthansa, for example, you can still rebook many tariffs free of charge in the first 24 hours.