The joke kind of falls down if you’re aware that the Australian Alps actually exist and that people do, in fact, ski there.
When our eighth grade class went to Washington DC, we saw a the TV news and the weatherman was pointing to the mid-Atlantic region and one kid said, “What are they pointing there for, we’re way up here.”
He had confused DC with Washington state. Shows how good our school system was 
The following is 100% true, witnessed by me. About two years ago, I was headed out to Silicon Valley. I was flying out of either Dulles or BWI on a connecting flight.
I was seated on the plane near an early 20s young woman on the phone with her mother, who was on the other end busily booking travel from San Jose, California to San Jose, Costa Rica for her daughter.
We were still at the gate and the plane was still boarding. I have no idea why she wasn’t getting off the plane, cause damn! I guess she didn’t want to lose her checked luggage, or something. I’m sure this is very difficult to believe. I couldn’t believe it myself as I witnessed it.
She didn’t seem particularly dumb, either. She was obviously frustrated, but pretty composed given the circumstances and was communicating well on the phone. It was a strange thing to witness, to say the least. I felt horrible for her, but I still can’t understand how anyone could possibly fuck up air travel that badly. I don’t even want to think about what the tickets to Costa Rica cost.
I wanted to tell her to get the fuck off the plane and sort her shit out instead of flying to California and back for fun, but there was really no way to engage her in conversation in any kind of discreet manner. I probably should have anyway, but frankly I was dumbfounded.
I remember a movie once where a character accidentally booked a vacation trip to Haiti, intending to go to Tahiti. It was fictional, of course, but it struck me as the kind of mistake that could be believable.
All of the confirmed cases involve people mixing up city names. You don’t book a flight to Australia or Austria, you book it to Sydney or Vienna or wherever.
Oh details, details…
You should never underestimate human stupidity.
Some people who wanted to fly with Ryanair to Rhodes ended up in a a town in France called Rodez (and Ryan didn’t even have any destinations in Greece), a Swedish couple wanting to go to Reykjavík flew to Rijeka in Croatia, checked in luggage for Stockholm has been shipped to Stockholm airport in Papua New Guinea (none of the airports around Stockholm in Sweden is called Stockholm), there is town called Melbourne in Florida, you can imagine possible mixups, etc etc.
Peripherally related, but I have heard tales of people wanting to ski in a nice, snowy Scandinavian country. So they book a flight to Denmark (max elevation 170.86 m / 560.56 ft). Maybe similar things can be said about skiing/mountain climbing in Illinois, Louisiana, or Florida.
Ryanair has, because it’s a cheap airline, the additional difficulty that they often don’t fly to the main airport of major city, but to a small, almost-unknown-to-the-public, airport nearby (Bonn-something instead of Düsseldorf). In the beginning, they didn’t see the need to tell their passengers beforehand that this required a costly and long bus transfer from the small airport to the main city that was the intended destination.
And yes, airports (and their letter codes) are often named after people or small places and not the city the travellers are thinking off; but even if you don’t use a travel agency, but the internet form instead, every time I looked at booking cheap flight tickets, they offer “city of dept.” and “city of destination” and then convert it to “do you mean airport XXX for city of …” before the next step of listing available flights and prices.
I do remember, however, when confusion of airport codes together with automated systems lead to a crash - a documentation on some news channel showed the investigation into a strange crash near some South American city. It turned out that the pilots had to select the airport from a list of abbreviations for the autopilot/ automatic landing thingie, and mis-read the name of the city they were heading for with a very similar-sounding city in a different country, resulting in the computer having the wrong maps for the approach, which was crucial because the approach was a narrow valley between two mountain ridges, with a sharp turn. At first by sight the pilots were okay, but then it got dark and they followed the maps and crashed.
Afterwards, the codes or the order of list for the computers was changed to make it more obvious for the pilots when selecting cities which country they were selecting first.
But who books only a flight without also a hotel and a ski pass? (Esp. since most ski resorts offer package deals: stay 5 nights, get a 4 day pass free/ stay 5 nights, get the 6th night free/ …)
Shouldn’t one look at the website of the city they want to stay in clue them in as to lack of skiing? Or was this in the days before internet, when information was more difficult to come by? But didn’t almost everybody use travel offices/ agencies back then, for that very reason?
Not Köln/Bonn. For that area they use the airport in Weeze, close to the Dutch border.
For example: people planning on staying with friends, or traveling in a group where each person books his own flight but a person is in charge of booking an apartment. So, my brother and his friends.
Sure it’s happened.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/dutch-tourists-land-in-sydney-canada-instead-of-australia/story-e6frf7jo-1225760111838
Dutch tourists land in Sydney, Canada instead of Australia
Hey, I didn’t know Washington DC and Washington the state were separate either. I guess it’s something people that know take for granted.
If there are people who don’t understand time zones, I don’t think this mistake is that hard to make.
The Austrian toilet has a shelf and flushes directly forward, so the coriolis effect, if existant in toilets would be entirely invisibile to the flusher.
Eh, I kind of screwed up in Iceland earlier this year.
I flew into Keflavik airport (from clt via jfk), which I thought was in Reykjavik. The following day, I had a tour booked up in the north part of the country and it included a flight from Reykjavik to Akureyri. I landed really late at night and was leaving early the next morning, so I just stayed at little hotel outside the airport. I went to the airport the next morning and realized that I was at the wrong airport. I was at Keflavik (which is in Kevlavik) and there is a small airport in Reykjavik, named as such, and I was flying not on Iceland Air, I was flying on Air Iceland. D’oh!
I knew I didn’t have time to fix that little snafu, so I just cabbed it to my hotel in Reykjavik and booked an off-road trip through the interior for the day - got to walk on a glacier and see some cool waterfalls, so no harm done. Two days later, after talking to the tour comapny, I got my whole cost refunded. Nice guys, the Icelandic.
I blame the mix-up on:
- A healthy dose of carelessness on my part.
- The fact that I didn’t book the airline tickets, which probably would have set off bells when I saw the 3 letter code.
- Keflavik is almost a suburb of Reyjavik (maybe a 15 minute drive) - and that’s where you fly to if you’re going to Reykjavik (kind of like Albany airport is in Schenectady, or the Cincinnatti airport is actually in Kentucky)
- All of the names of things in Iceland are ridiculous
I think there was an episode of Newhart where some characters were, for whatever reason, travelling to Morocco. Before the plane takes off, Stephanie makes some comment about wanting to see Prince Ranier, at which point Joanna tells her that’s Monaco, not Morocco.
In 1998, the Canadian had its annual summer meeting in St. John, New Brunswick. One speaker from Europe went to St. Johns, Newfoundland. Note that in French, they are both called St. Jean.
However, in this case I don’t blame the tourists:
I wonder if it’s a case of abbreviations in a database, or if travel agents no longer go through a training to know which Sydney people usually refer to?