Dumbest Booking Error

[sengsational]

I do all the travel booking for the two of us, and although I send copies of confirmations and ask for "another set of eyes", things don't get validated.

So today I was organizing my month-long fall trip that includes a multi-city airline booking that starts and ends the trip, then a few flights and a cruise in between. When I booked that multi-city, I had lots of thrashing, so ended-up keying it in way too many times. Finally booked it a few weeks ago. Today I realized the last leg was the wrong date Thankfully, it was booked with points, so I was able to cancel and re-book without a penalty, but if I hadn't see the boo-boo, we'd have been a no-show for the flight, and had no way home when we got there later.

Once I get things booked, I put everything into an itinerary spreadsheet, and I would have noticed the problem with the date, but I don't usually bother with the spreadsheet so far out (the travel starts in late September).

Here's a really dumb one that I DIDN'T catch. I stepped off the trans-Atlantic cruise in Florida and requested an Uber to the airport, and it was telling me it was a 3 hour drive! At first, I was booking a cruise ending in Port Everglades, so booked the flight home out of Fort Lauderdale. Then I switched to a different cruise that ended in Port Canaveral, and didn't fix the flight

I realize, I'm really bad at this travel booking stuff. There's probably not many people here that can top my blunders, or want to admit theirs, but if so, might be entertaining/instructional. Or maybe how you make sure you don't book travel like I do

 

[audreyh1]

I use the Apple Calendar for my travel schedule planning and actual. Two different views. The booked travel is shared with DH.

We have a really long multi-city trip in Europe this summer. I did discover recently that I had accidentally had 4 nights instead of 3 nights in Dresden as I hadn’t correctly blocked it out in the travel calendar, but that actually works out better anyway overall.

Logistics is hard!

 

[Montecfo]

I put all in a spreadsheet with a line for each day as I book. It has helped me prevent and catch errors.

 

[target2019]

We share a Google doc with proposed dates and final bookings. Comments generate email notices, and we resolve everything that way

 

[SecondCor521]

Recently was booking my "Eclipse 2024" trip. I had a bunch of tabs open for flights, rental cars, hotels, etc. and was trying to optimize everything for price, convenience, etc.

Ended up booking the flight into Houston (cheaper flight) and the rental car out of Austin (closest to the eclipse path). Thankfully one of my sisters caught it and pointed it out. Was able to switch the rental car to Houston, so it all worked out.

...

Not really a booking error, but another time I completely mentally missed what day it was when we were on a trip to England. Couldn't understand why the hotel wanted to kick us out "a day early" and the flight checkin reminder showed up "a day early". Finally dawned on me about eight hours after our flight departed. Was able to book a hotel near Heathrow and rebook the flight out the next morning. Cost a boatload of points and some dollars, but we got home safely.

 

[Out-to-Lunch]

I usually use pen and paper, but this one seemed too simple, no? We are traveling for exactly 2 weeks: first week domestic, then fly to Paris for a week. I booked a domestic hotel for March 9 to March 16. Then I booked a Parisian stay for March 16 to March 23. Sounds perfect.

Of course, except for that little fact that we will be spending the night of March 16 in seat 12D (or whatever) on the plane. I bought a night Paris when I will not be there yet!

 

[flyingaway]

That happened to me several times. 10 days ago, I was leaving U.S. for Japan and reviewing my hotel booking for the next day, and found that my late February hotel was actually booked for late March, for my next trip to Japan. I usually book refundable hotel rooms, so I cancelled it and booked a new one.

 

[DrRoy]

We try to be so careful about this but things still happen. We had booked a VRBO house in Tucson for February. About a week prior to the trip, as we usually do, we went over all the reservations to confirm that all was well, and we found a six month old email saying that the house had been cancelled. We scrambled and found a replacement house (at greater expense, of course). As it happened, the new house was in a much better location for us, so we got something for the $.

 

[Backpacker]

I learned that tampa/st.pete has two different airports. I'd always heard the town(s) mentioned together. Flew in to st. Pete ( in the dark of night) picked up Rental car enjoyed a week stay. Ready to go home, punched in tampa/st. Pete airport and up pops tampa airport... arrived, turned in rental car and walked in airport couldn't find our airlines desk. Ran back out to retrieve rental car, it was gone! Luckily the rental agent let us take a different car with zero paperwork to speed over to st. Pete and make our flight. I wrote a very nice thanks to the company mentioned agent that saved the day.

 

[athena53]

I use Tripit.com to automatically assemble the itinerary and check for errors; the free version is fine and you can forward e-mail confirmations from hotels and airlines and manually add activities, cruise itineraries, etc. That would be my only complaint: manually typing in the details of cruises and guided tours (it can't parse a PDF file or a web page) can get tedious and can introduce errors.

My mistake was something different. I forget which Eastern European airline it was, but it was a one-way from the end of the tour to London. I wasn't paying attention to the input format and put my last name where my first name should have been, and vice versa. I figured it out when I went on-line later and couldn't find the reservation. The opinion on the FlyerTalk Board was that they MIGHT let me on the flight. But maybe not. I tried sending them an e-mail asking if they would pretty please correct the error. No response, of course. I didn't want to attempt a call to the country (no US phone number), so I gave up and bought a second ticket. It wasn't that expensive and I'm sure that even if they'd been available on the day of travel the price would have gone up.

 

[simple girl]

I feel your pain. I am so paranoid about making a big mistake. I verbally walk through all flight itineraries with hubby before hitting the "purchase" button. That helps...sort of...I think he only half listens so it really just takes the pressure off of me that if a mistake is made, I'm not solely responsible, lol!

The other thing I do is I go back to good old pen and paper. Yes, I put our overall itinerary in our electronic calendar, but the nitty gritty details are written out on a paper calendar. This way I can visually see which nights I need hotels, etc.

I also hard print all of our flights, hotels, and car rentals after the final versions are booked. I have a travel binder, and I put everything in the binder in the order in which we will need them. I highlight all of the dates and then double check that everything matches up with my hard calendar.

When we travel I love having that binder! I can just open it up and see the details I need for the next thing on our itinerary.

For really complicated itineraries (like our trip to Yellowstone or Hawaii) I also make a detailed timeline itinerary on an excel spreadsheet for each day.

 

[olyveoil]

Manchester, NH rental car instead of Manchester, UK rental car.

 

[MarieIG]

Reading this made me realize that I have never booked a trip.

Before I was married my mother booked trips though a travel agent, after I was married DH handled it, and for the few times at work I needed to book trips for a client one of the secretaries did it for me. Uggg.

I love Simple Girl's binder method.

 

[EastWest Gal]

This thread made me check tripit on my phone for an upcoming trip in two weeks. I booked a night at an airport hotel in Vancouver, and found that I had made two reservations-one for one room, two queen beds, and another for two rooms, king bed each. I'm traveling with my adult son for a ski trip. If I wanted to be frugal I would have gone with the one room, but we both prefer our privacy and I sometimes snore a little.

So I called the hotel and straightened it out. What is strange is that the hotel website had one reservation and I got only an email for the other reservation. Anyway, it's all taken care of.

And I've made booking mistakes in the past, despite double and triple checking everything. We went to Hawaii in 2018 and found ourselves with a one night gap between the Big Island and Maui at time share stays. We turned that lemon into lemonade by staying one night at Volcano Lodge, overlooking Kilauea, and had one of the best dinners I've ever had there.

 

[sengsational]

Hearing all of these trials in travel logistics makes me feel a bit better about my booking blunders.

I think paper might benefit my booking process. I have a calendar on my desktop machine with everything from the dentist to lunch gatherings to my travel plans, but if I had a "big square" paper calendar with a pencil, that might be easier. Easier to jot down ideas vs done bookings and those important confirmation numbers.

But the haphazard part is a PowerPoint that I paste stuff into. I start a PP at the 'getting interested' stage and it's more about general prices and general timeframe and why it would be a cool trip. A lot of those go nowhere. But if it does get serious, I'll have a mixture of rough dates and rough prices and then those first few hard bookings with confirmation numbers. So it's that transition and all of the leftover baggage of the idea stage. After this latest gaffe, I put a big brightly colored "BOOKED" on the page, visible from the slide sorter view.

 

[pb4uski]

I use Tripit.com to automatically assemble the itinerary and check for errors; the free version is fine and you can forward e-mail confirmations from hotels and airlines and manually add activities, cruise itineraries, etc. That would be my only complaint: manually typing in the details of cruises and guided tours (it can't parse a PDF file or a web page) can get tedious and can introduce errors. ...

We use TripIt too. Very handy. Better than a spreadsheet IMO and I'm a spreadsheet guy.

 

[Palmtree]

Back in the 80's I traveled a lot for work and racked up frequent flyer points. My girlfriend (now wife of 33 years) had never been out of the country so to impress her I booked us a week in the Virgin islands. We boarded the flight out of Atlanta and was settling in our seats when someone came and said "Excuse me but you're in our seats." I said "no, must be a mistake. Look at our boarding passes. See these are our seats." A flight attendant was called to work it out. It seems we were in the right seats, but for yesterdays flight! Oops! The flight was not full so they just moved us to a pair of empty seats and that was it. This was way before 9/11. No way that would happen today.

 

[SecondCor521]

One tip: If you're a combination of polite and contrite, you can sometimes (often?) get nonrefundable reservations refunded.

...

Another one that almost happened is that my Dad was going to his grandson's college graduation in western Massachusetts. I was helping him find a hotel and put in "Albany". I was about to pull the trigger on the reservation because the price was good. Luckily I decided to see how close the hotel was to the university so I put it in Google maps to get directions. Turns out if you are in Idaho, Google thinks you mean "Albany, Oregon", not "Albany, New York", and it would have been 2,000+ miles to the graduation ceremony.

 

[jollystomper]

I applaud you folks booking trips with multiple flights in and out of different destinations... to complicated for me, I stick to point-to-point flights . I am also fortunate having to book my work travel for about my last 15 years of work (Megacorp did away with the internal travel booking departments and replaced it with an occasionally working and ever changing online system ), so I learned my lessons there.

Last year made I a dumb mistake/ I booked a rental minivan through Hertz to use when one of our sons and his family came to visit for several weeks, starting in February. I rushed and saw I would be picking it up on Monday the 13th and returning it several weeks later. I show up on the Monday afternoon, they do not have my reservation. I was sure I booked it correctly. They pulled up all of my reservation records... I had the right day of the week and day, but booked the wrong month - the 13th was also a Monday in March last year, and I had booked March instead of February .

I admitted my mistake and figuratively threw myself on the mercy of the court. Fortunately, they were gracious and scrambled to get me a minivan, as our relatives were arriving the next day in the morning. Afternoon the rental I gladly filled out the survey and left a detailed thank you to the staff members, by name, who helped out despite my mistake.

The nice bit is that I think they appreciated the feedback I submitted... ever since then, when I have rented from that location, they have always offered to upgrade me to a higher class of car than I have booked at no charge. Sometimes admitting your mistakes and showing appreciating to the folks who serve you can make a difference .

 

[audreyh1]

I routinely do open jaw a.k.a multi-city flights to Europe. It’s quite convenient to return to the US from a different airport and doesn’t usually cost more. Then we may do a one-way flight within Europe but this is with a European airline.

ICalendar works well for me because you can add tons of information in the notes for any given item as well as reminders/notifications and links. I routinely put booking confirmation numbers, check-in and out times, room type, cost, special requests, hotel contact info, etc. in each item note for quick access. It’s available on all our devices and shared with DH. Copies of emails/confirmations are saved in the cloud. Tickets are stored in the wallet.

This next one coming up is pretty complicated. 9 different cities over 6 weeks. Trains between most but one flight. I have all the hotels booked, that took a while. International flights reserved. The biggest train trip booked. Still have numerous intercity train trips to book, already picked, and the one way flight. Heavily using that ICalendar!

 

[Closet_Gamer]

A few years ago we were in our hotel in Barcelona getting ready for our flight to Athens the next morning. I went to check-in online and the reservation code was invalid.

I logged into the airline's web site and received a message saying "We hope you enjoyed your flight" ... past tense. This is not good.

I had booked the flight for the previous month!

Fortunately we were able to find flights the next day that were totally outrageous price-wise.

 

[athena53]

I am also fortunate having to book my work travel for about my last 15 years of work (Megacorp did away with the internal travel booking departments and replaced it with an occasionally working and ever changing online system ), so I learned my lessons there.

Oh, yeah- the on-line "travel tools". Uh-huh. The humans they had before at our company weren't all that smart but the new system REQUIRED that you answer the question of whether or not a visa was required- even if you were flying from Kansas City to Chicago. I would amuse myself by answering Yes and when it asked what country, typing in "Whooziwhatsistan". No one ever called me about it.

Worse (and back to the OT of booking blunders), one of our execs arrived at the airport for a flight to Brazil not knowing he was supposed to have gotten a visa in advance. He missed a conference. It would have been nice if the computer had noted the visa requirement when the flight was booked.

 

[GrayHare]

I guess this famous example isn't really as a booking error, but it's fun. "Back in 1985, a 21-year-old Sacramento community college student named Michael Lewis was returning to the United States from a three-month vacation in West Germany, according to the Los Angeles Times. He was supposed to fly from London to Los Angeles, transfer and fly to Oakland, California. Instead, he misheard an announcement, and boarded a flight from London to Auckland, New Zealand. 'They didn’t say Auckland. They said Oakland,' he told the LA Times. 'They talk different.'” https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/27/us/wrong-flight-passengers-trnd/index.html

 

[Out-to-Lunch]

Manchester, NH rental car instead of Manchester, UK rental car.

I was at a scientific conference in Portland, OR, and a large group of German colleagues mysteriously cancelled their talks. They were, of course, sitting in Portland, ME.

 

[Teacher Terry]

I don’t take as complicated trips as many of you so I fly out of the same airport I landed in. My last few trips that hasn’t been the case but the tour company handled the flights. I always print everything out also.