pay attention! If you do, you won’t be like Alan Jordan, who recently boarded a Virgin Atlantic Airways flight from New York to London only to discover that he had overlooked a small but important detail. He had made one of those stupid travel mistakes.
“The lady at the ticket counter greeted me very politely, looked at my ticket and said, ‘Mr. Jordan, you are flying to London tomorrow. How can I help you?’ “he remembers.
Jordan is no novice. As a consultant based in Great Neck, NY, he travels frequently. He knew better.
That’s the thing about travel errors. You don’t need to travel occasionally to make a mess. It can happen to anyone. This is a good time to think about travel hassles, before your next big vacation or business trip.
Jordan was lucky. A sympathetic supervisor rebooked him on that day’s flight to London at no extra charge. “She was very kind,” he says.
Lesson learned? Double-check your dates before you go.
It’s a lesson we keep learning. Now, amid the surge in travel, my advocacy team is filing dozens of cases of people who have neglected to read their itineraries carefully.
When I say that no one is immune from mistakes, I include myself.
When I was traveling in America a few years ago, I remembered a mistake. I gave my travel advisor Melissa the weekend off and went DIY. I booked a room at a hotel in Portland, which was my next stop on a West Coast road trip. When I tried to check-in, the hotel had never heard of me. Turns out I had booked a room in Portland, Maine instead of Portland Oregon.
Oops.
Lesson learned? Pay attention – or work with a consultant who does.
I am in good company. Your travel mistakes are also great learning opportunities.
You say 10/11, I say 11/10
Taylor Ann Giardina has spent years traveling around the world, but she keeps getting confused by date formats. In the United States, we would write October 11 as 10/11/17; In the rest of the world, it is 11/10/17. Get it confused, and you could reserve a room or flight on the wrong day. “I once missed my flight, thinking it was the day after, because I misread the reservation, which was written in the European format — day/month/year,” says Giardina, an interior designer in Austin. “Being an experienced traveler, I was overconfident that I had read it correctly and didn’t double-check my dates.” Lesson: Don’t believe anything. Avoid these small mistakes while travelling.
If it sounds too good to be true…
Chris Morton learned this when his mother found a cheap rental car in Iceland this year for $400 a week. “Everything was perfect until we turned it back on before the flight home,” says Morton, a writer who lives in Detroit. “We thought we had already paid for the entire rental, but they said we only paid for one day. My mom looked up her confirmation email, and to our surprise, she realized the rental agent was right. She had somehow only booked the car for one day.” Morton had to pay an additional $900 for his SUV. The takeaway: You can’t rent an SUV in Iceland for $400 a week.
trust but verify
Google and Apple’s mapping apps are pretty useful, except when they’re not. Andy Abramson, who runs a communications consulting firm in Los Angeles, discovered this on a recent winery tour in France. “In some of the more rural parts, where wineries are typically located, Google Maps will give you some options, but not all are actually road worthy of taking a car,” he says. “On more than a few occasions, Google has led me to roads that are best driven in a 4×4 – or taken on horseback.” Lesson: Never trust anyone or anything completely, even Google.
Focus on a topic? No matter the mistake, there is usually someone on the other end making misconceptions about times, dates, locations and prices. You think you know something, but really you don’t.
The solution is simple: pay attention. Double-check the details of your next trip, or hire someone who can do so. Otherwise, you’ll end up as an anecdote in one of my travel columns.
Three more time travel mistakes you should avoid
Keep track of time, not day
This is especially important on international flights with long connections. Pay attention to both the time and day when you are booking. Some stopovers can be long, and it’s easy to overlook that “+1 day”, as a result, you could be stuck at the airport for more than 24 hours waiting for your connecting flight.
No flight information on your rental car
Always share your flight number when you book a rental car at the airport. If your flight is late, your car rental company may hold your reservation as a courtesy. Otherwise, they will cancel your reservation and ask you to make a new booking, almost always at a higher rate.
Hotel check-in and check-out dates
This is an easy mistake. You will always check in one day and check out the next day after an overnight stay. Travelers constantly mess up their check-in and check-out dates and end up cutting themselves a day short. An experienced travel professional can help prevent this.
Keep an eye on “+1 day”. On long flights, arrival the next day is common. Missing that detail will result in you not getting a hotel room or missing the connection.
the price is wrong
Too good to be true. If you get a rental car for $400 a week while everyone else charges $1,000, check for confirmation. Maybe you’ve booked it for just one day.
Read the fine print. Low prices often hide large fees or strict cancellation policies. Always read the terms before clicking “Buy”.
Also read:
How not to find a good travel agent?
Trump’s rollback of airline fee disclosure rule hurts travelers
