Since the title of this thread is Dumbest Booking Error, I’ll enter the competition with one I made when making air reservations for DW and me for a trip to Portugal that including a TAP Airlines booking.
So I’m on their site, find the flights I want, select them, and start filling out the usual online forms - name, address, passport, etc.
I’m doing this on the same PC Chrome browser that I use all the time, and it knows a lot of my info and prefills it for me. So when I come to fill out DW’s info I entered her first name in the first box. As I started typing our shared last name in the separate second box the browser offers to fill in the rest of the address info so I accept that.
Finished filling it all out, purchased, done.
Two days later I’m reviewing the confirmation email and notice it’s got my full name listed on both tickets. The browser autofill apparently changed her name to mine in the first name box when I accepted the autofill. Doh!
A big whoops, for sure, but one I thought wouldn’t be irrecoverable with a quick call to TAP. Nope. Nothing doing. They said the ticket was non-changeable, non-refundable, and wouldn’t help me out. Ultimately I ended up buying another ticket for DW with her name on it.
Irritating, but a good lesson learned: web form autofill can be a real time saver - but always double check the confirmation emails as soon as you get them.