Yeah, and I remember a movie where a girl drove all the way to Boston because some idiot told her that her boyfriend was driving to “Austin”, Massachusetts.
When I lived in Idaho, I discovered many Americans don’t really know the difference between Idaho and Iowa. They thought cheese came from Idaho and potatos came from Iowa.
Just yesterday I was mentioning this on another thread and feeling really anal-retentive for doing so. Knowing that it’s actually tripped someone up makes me feel like less of a pedant.
I don’t think that characterization is too accurate. Keflavik and Reykjavik are about 50 kilometres apart (so the drive is more like 45 minutes), and most of that stretch is pretty barren landscape, at least on the inland side.
I have a friend whose mom came to visit him in the US, she doesn’t speak English very well and ended up in Dallas Texas as opposed to Dulles airport. But you can’t blame her for not knowing the difference.
I can imagine people mistaking the two, or even being so stupid as to only know of the country of Australia and not to even know of a country called Austria.
What I can’t imagine is someone being that stupid and be able to book a flight to the wrong country. That would mean that they would have had to do a little research to make the booking and would likely discuss their plans with other people, one of whom would surely identify their mistake.
NE1 knoz if u bk on da web u hav 2 use txt spk. Rodez makez sens innit 
When I was in college (1980s), my parents apparently felt that they could finally take a vacation alone (i.e., without the kids), and so, they went to the Bahamas. While they were there, they sent me postcards. I was returning to my dorm room, after picking up my mail, and was looking at the postcard they sent. One of the guys who lived down the hall saw me, and asked, “Who sent you a postcard?” I replied, “My parents…they’re on vacation in Nassau.” “Oh! Are they there to see the Space Shuttle launch?” 
OP of the other thread here.
According to my desk clerk, everyone has heard of Australia, but not everyone has heard of Austria. Some of them assume Austria is some kind of abbreviation or colloquialism. So when making their reservations, there’s usually a moment of “Gee, I didn’t know Vienna was in Australia.” So they book their flights and hotels. Once they get to Austria, they are somehow oblivious of all the signs being in German, plus the currency. They just hop into a taxi to the hotel. Never underestimate the human capacity for stupidity.
He said this never used to happen, back when people used a travel agent. It’s an entirely online phenomenon. So if necessary, he helps them book a flight/hotel to Australia. The hopelessly stupid ones assume there’s nothing to do or see in Vienna, and just go back home.
Here’s the t-shirt I bought. (Actually, there are kangaroos in the Vienna Zoo.)
They get Iowa and Ohio confused too. And many people think Ohio is exactly midway between the two coasts.
On a slightly different note, a while ago I ordered on line a small electronics unit from a US manufacturer. Delivery by FedEx I think. After I ordered it I checked the tracking info, and discovered that the destination country was Austria, not Australia. Didn’t matter. I watched the package arrive in Austria, and in a few hours get loaded onto a plane to Oz. All without any intervention. They recognised that the actual street address was not in Austria, and worked out that it did really need to go to Australia. They are clearly quite used to it.
There are tales of confused students showing up at Cornell College, a small liberal arts college in Iowa, thinking they were at the much larger and more famous Cornell University. The college has a page explaining the difference.
One of my best friends in high school went on to Cornell College. He did, indeed, realize the difference from the start, and enjoyed leading people on: “yeah, I go to Cornell.” 
(Cornell College has the distinction of being one of the few schools where you take one class at a time, each class lasting only 3 1/2 weeks. I can’t even begin to imagine studying a semester’s worth of, say, calculus or literature in 3 1/2 weeks. 
)
A cousin of mine applied to an accepted a slot in a Phd program at the University of Washington… and was surprised to discover that she would be living in Seattle instead of DC.
Not travel-related, but funny (to me, at least). When I was a little kid, we moved from the USA to Puerto Rico. My parents enrolled the kids in a local Spanish-speaking school figuring we’d pick up the language pretty quickly. When I studied geography, I constantly confused Suecia “SWEH syah” (Sweden) with Suiza “SWEE sah” (Switzerland).
In the interests of accuracy (and personal interest and recent reading of this crash report on my part), this was American Airlines Flight 965 which crashed on its way to Cali, Columbia in 1995.
The navigational error wasn’t the airport codes, but the navigational beacon waypoints and a mis-handling of the flight management computer by the flight crew. In changing the intended approach to Cali in order to fly straight in rather than do a couple of turns, the pilots cleared the pre-programmed waypoints from the flight computer and needed to re-program some in order to coordinate the landing approach with air traffic control.
In doing so, they had to program in the code for the ROZO non-directional beacon, which was identified on their charts with the letter “R”. The flight crew used “R” to program the computer, unaware that “R” was the code for the ROMEO NDB, towards Bogota. The correct code for ROZO was “ROZO”.
This mistake led the plane to turn towards the ROMEO beacon, which basically resulted in the airplane flying into a mountain, since the pilots had lowered the plane’s altitude and speed for the landing in Cali.
Among other changes in response to this crash, the ROZO waypoint has been replaced with PALMA, “PL”.
As for airport codes, there are several mistakes made by inattentive people looking to book cheap tickets into Toronto and they end up at Billy Bishop City Centre airport (YTZ) downtown Toronto or at John C Munro Hamilton International Airport (THM) in Hamilton, Ontario, instead of Pearson International (YYZ), which is the major airport in the region.
Sometimes, the flight is simply listed as landing at “YTO”, which is the generic code for all three of those airports. I’ve seen flights for Toronto listed as “Toronto-40km”, which is code for landing in Hamilton!
Since Mirabel is now closed to passenger traffic and not much lands at St Hubert, a similar problem no longer really arises in Montreal, though there is a generic code here too (I think it’s YMO?). The airport in Plattsburgh NY advertises itself as “Montreal’s US Airport”, apparently.
Well it’s definitely barren, I’ll give you that - and maybe the drive is longer than I recall. But it was close enough to cab it, and Keflavik isn’t really a city, it’s tiny.
Has anyone ever gone to Australia expecting to arrive in the European dark age Frankish kingdom of Austrasia?
D"OH! You beat me to it! (I’m reading a 100-year-old collection of books on medieval history, and the Frankish empire under Charlemagne is what I’m reading about right now.)
Anyway, it’s definitely not unusual for city names to get mixed up. Vancouver, British Columbia and Vancouver, Washington, are not that far apart, relatively speaking. And, unfortunately, despite Vancouver, WA being the fifth-largest city in the state (or was, when I lived there), most people immediately think of Vancouver, BC first when they hear the name. Even people who live in Washington. I think this is because Vancouver, BC is the most prominent city in British Columbia, while Vancouver, WA gets overshadowed by Portland, Oregon, which is directly across the Columbia River.
This led to some amusing situations when my family moved to Wenatchee, WA, from Vancouver, WA:
My dad encountered more than one person who, despite knowing that he had been a Washington State Patrolman for nearly 30 years, immediately assumed he was Canadian when he mentioned that he had just moved here from Vancouver :dubious:
On my first day at Wenatchee High School, my band teacher (with whom I had met while registering for classes) introduced me to the band class and told them I was “from Vancouver”. Two months later, I was at a school dance and ended up dancing with a clarinet player who wanted to know when I would be going back home. Turned out she thought I was a foreign exchange student. All the way from British Columbia :smack:
I was traveling alone in 1994, in Spain, armed with high school/one-semester-of-college Spanish, when I made a point of being very careful not to become a character in one of these stories. I had to book tickets to St. Petersburg, Russia and make sure that my obvious American accent didn’t lead to a ticket to St. Petersburg, Florida. The agent was pretty incredulous, but I was pretty insistent.
Moreover, the one in Canada is Sydney, NS and the one in Australia is Sydney, NSW.