I keep worrying about people showing up in Charlotte looking for the Carolingians.
Columbus made a similar mistake, it could be claimed.
Columbus has a bad enough reputation without you claiming that he sailed around the world looking for a sorter passage to Austria…
“Ayiti”, “Tahiti,” I can see that.
It doesn’t snow in Denmark either, I’m told.
Silly, cheese comes from Wisconsin! 
One advantage of living in the central US is that one can eventually get states sorted by their rough direction and distance from one’s own. But you still have to work at it a bit.
No, I don’t.
Ja, warum sie bitten.
Bill Paxton, from the film Ruthless People.
A former employer sold a lot of stuff to the IAEA, headquartered in Vienna. After more than one shipment was delayed by misrouting, we started addressing parcels " Vienna,Austria,EUROPE". Also when Kevbabe came to visit when I was working over there, one of her orkers asked if she could bring back a boomerang.
The person may have gotten on the plane in Canada, had a stop in the US then NZ, so the passports would have already been checked.
See the link in post #17.
“Guten Tag, Mate”
Hopefully they won’t try to fly to Gran Canaria or Mallorca now (the respective capitals are Las Palmas and Palma).
It would have taken a superb travel agent simply to know that there was a St. Petersburg in Florida as well as the original San Petersburgo; you probably were safe 
Airports can be a royal pain in the ass if the traveler or their agent aren’t careful. constanze and others have already mentioned those cheap companies which do things such as sell Noáin airport as Bilbao or Saragossa as Barcelona (in both cases, 3-4h away by car if you already know the way). I once got sent from a location 1h west of Saragossa to one in SE Switzerland in a hurry; I don’t think the travel agent checked where I was starting from or where the final destination was, she booked me Barcelona-Milano in the afternoon (arrival 23:30) and Milano-Zurich the next morning (leaving at 7:15) and a five-star hotel smack in the center of Milano.
The airport was 90 minutes from downtown Milano with no traffic and an Italian driver (read: they’re not suicidal but they fake it well); of three airports sold as “Milano”, she’d managed to pick the most-distant one. The look in the receptionist’s face when I told him I’d need a wake-up call and cab, and the time, was priceless. The half-rate for using the room during four hours only was nice, but I still would have preferred being able to verify that the dark shape outside my window was, indeed, the cathedral.
Add two six-hour train trips (one from where I was to Barcelona, one from Zurich to where I was going) and for a trip which didn’t involve any “wrong codes” per se it sure was a nightmare.
I have read about that mistake every number of times in fictional books, but only once have I encountered it myself and this was in Lisbon.
I just remembered how a friend of mine, a well travelled person who has been all over the World, was going to Goa (I don’t recall where he started, but it was somewhere in Europe) and landed at GOA (Genoa). For some reason everybody loves to remind him.
She’d been away so long, she went wrong and lost her way.
I had some distant relatives who frequently travelled back and forth between the UK and Australia. When my father needed to send them a package there was some brief confusion, because he wasn’t sure if they were currently staying in South Wales, or New South Wales. It was resolved satisfactorily, and the package arrived safely.
Has anyone ever aimed for Baden-Baden, but ended up in Baden?
This isn’t countries, but – passengers (especially Western) frequently mixed up Jaipur (Rajasthan, India) with Jodhpur (also Rajasthan, India, but 200 miles away). Working at Jodhpur Airport, we used to have to locate passengers for Jaipur who had disembarked at the wrong airport – apparently, to them, all ‘purs’ sounded alike…
Slightly off-topic, but one of my wife’s friends went to New Zealand for a summer vacation without realizing that it would be “winter-like” there. BTW, she’s a school teacher (sigh).
During the Vancouver Olympics, there were many, many stories about people making reservations and a few stories about people ending up in Vancouver WA. About 300 miles south.
An ungodly number of people think that seasons are caused by the distance from earth to the sun changing and therefore are the same everywhere in the world. Depending on the type of schoolteacher she is, I wouldn’t necessarily expect her to be more knowledgeable.
[QUOTE=amarinth]
During the Vancouver Olympics, there were many, many stories about people making reservations and a few stories about people ending up in Vancouver WA. About 300 miles south.
[/QUOTE]
A former boss of mine got caught in this situation. He was going to Vancouver on a business trip, and planned to extend it into a vacation with his girlfriend in a B&B up on Vancouver Island. Turns out the business trip was to the Vancouver in Washington, and he had to scramble to get some transportation between the business trip and the vacation.
I spent two hours waiting in the Chinese Taipei (defacto) embassy (aka Taiwan), Whilst I was waiting, 5 couriers came in, three of them wanted the [Kingdom of] Thailand embassy.
If most professional delivery personnel can’t tell the difference, then it is wrong for a what’s effectively a country to delibrately call themselves something so easy to confuse with a more established nation’s “brand”.
Then again, they probably would have the same problem if they promoted themselves as the Republic of China.
Are you sure she didn’t realize that? Australia is not New Zealand, of course, but I travelled to Australia many times during the northern hemisphere’s summer (Australia’s winter), knowing full well that it would be winter there. But I also knew it would be nothing like the winters I was used to in Canada. It was actually a very pleasant time of year to go to the southern hemisphere–warm but not uncomfortably hot, as I understand it can be during the summer.