I overheard this conversation in a restaurant last night and it cracked me up. Two women were talking about a mutual friend who seemed to be quite the snob.
“So she kept going on and on about how she was planning this trip to Cabo (Cabo San Lucas, Mexico) and Cabo this and Cabo that and then she told me about booking her trip through a new travel agency and told them ‘I just need a flight to Cabo, no hotel in Cabo.’ I guess she has this friend who is letting her use the condo in Cabo.”
“Yeah – she told me about the condo.”
“Wait – you haven’t heard the best part. So she is getting ready to leave, the plane ticket arrives and it is a good thing she read it before she went to the airport – the ticket wasn’t to ‘Cabo’, it was to ‘Kabul’ – as in Afghanistan!”
That’s what I get for trying to read TWO different message boards on TWO different screens about TWO different topics… and allowing myself to become distracted by WORK!
What I MEANT to say was…
As a Travel professional myself, I’m apalled.
And a bit skeptical.
After all, the FARE to Kabul would HAVE to be substantially higher than to Cabo. The agent would also have an obligation to inform the traveler of certain travel documents needed; certainly different for each destination.
I have my doubts that it actually got to the “heading out the door to the airport and reading the airline ticket” stage before being caught. More likely, the misunderstanding was caught at the “you’ll have to change planes in London England and Baku Azerbaijan and arrive two days later” point; before any ticket was issued.
I would think flying into Kabul would raise a buttload of internal warnings on the travel agents computer as it is an international hot spot right now and not exactly a resort desination.
An example might be: Must verify passport & visa information.
I’m a travel professional and the airport codes aren’t even close:
SJD / SAN JOSE DEL CABO MEXICO KBL / KABUL DEM REP OF AFGHANISTAN
It’s most unlikely.
A more believable mistake would be a ticket confusing Honolulu (HNL) with Helana, Montana (HLN).
I would not be too sure about that. I once booked a ticket (via our company travel agent) into the NY area. My plane arrived on Saturday, my hotel check in was for the following Wed.
Or there was this guy who worked for us who flew out to Burbank Ca for a couple of days of business. He got off the plane, and Hertz did not have his rental car waiting. He complained and they looked up his confirmation number. He car was reserved at LAX only about 30 miles away. So he decided to look very closely at his hotel reservation. His hotel was in downtown… Detroit. :smack: :eek:
Or the time I was on the phone with a travel agent trying to arrange travel from the SF bay area to Portland Oregon. I told her I would prefer to leave from Oakland Airport. She tells me that united does not fly OAK-PDX. OK I say route me from SFO. She agains tells me there are no United Flights. I tell her sure there are, I have taken them before. She insists ther are no flight. I launch my web browser go to United’s web site, find the flight I want. I tell her to try Flight #XXXX. Her response: “I thought you wanted to fly OAK-SFO-PDX.” She did not know that Oakland and San Francisco are within line of sight of each other. :wally
Shortly after Al Gore invented the internet and there was a wave of businesspeople deciding to book their own flights, we got a call from a client.
He was at an airport in West Virginia and he was suppose to be in South Carolina.
He was really pissed.
We thought “oh crap, this is OUR agency’s fault.” And then we pulled up his record and he had booked himself on Northwest through their system to go to where ever it was that has the same city name in WV as SC. I think it was Charleston.
NW does not fly into SC. That is US Air territory. He had to by two one way tickets. One to get to Charleston, SC and then another one to get back to DTW.
Reminds me of the story about a lady taking a flight from NY to Oakland, CA. Her flight went to LA first, when her plane landed they announced that the people continuing on to Auckland can stay onboard, so she did.
Reminds me of when we were living in Hawai’i, my Dad was going on a business trip. The arrangements were being made by the company that was on the mainland (they wanted him there, so they were using their in-house travel agent to set things up).
We were on O’ahu, and Dad had told the travel agent dude that Honolulu (HNL) was the airport he needed to fly in and out of. The travel agent kept trying to get Dad to fly out of Kahalui, Maui (OGG: don’t ask me why that’s the code).
“Why can’t you just drive over?”
This after Dad told him it was on a different island. :wally
“But why can’t you just drive over?”
:rolleyes: (It took awhile to get this through to the travel agent.)
In September 2003 I was so excited to be making my first trip overseas to Fiji for a 3 day conference followed by a week of holidaying.
I was excited, that is, before my travel agent stuffed around with my bookings and tickets for two months, finally sending my tickets and other information to me the day before I was due to leave - with the wrong return date on them! :mad: Definately not a happy person that day!
Luckily I had one working day to talk to another fantastic person at the same agency and she tried to sort things out before I left, allowing me to pick up my return ticket from their office in Nadi, Fiji while the conference was on.
As it turned out, she did her job but the people at the other end didn’t do theirs so when I got to Nadi airport at 10pm the agency people weren’t expecting me. The Australian office had also neglected to send me meal/hotel vouchers (being a first time traveller I didn’t have any understanding of what I needed, very naive I know). So glad the I was part of a group - sorry, travelling alone but a package deal for the conference - and the Fijian people took great care of me.
When I went to the Nadi office to pick up my ticket - it wasn’t there and I missed a whole day of the conference sitting in the travel agent while they tried to sort out the problem.
Needless to say, when I arrived home a week later I wrote a long letter to the manager of the company involved, along with printouts of the emails I had sent comfirming booking details (thank goodness I saved them!) About a week after that I received a letter of apology from this guy and about $150 worth of vouchers for a major department store.
Well, I wanted my first trip overseas to be memorable!
I called Avis and booked a car in San Jose, Costa Rica. When I got there they had no record of my reservation, but the agency in California did.
A travel agent booked a room at the “Best Western” in Madrid. At the airport, at least 15 cab drivers put their heads together and came up empty as to where we were going. When I got home, instead of saying she was sorry, she said I might have to pay for not keeping the reservation.
