Right name, wrong place
| By Oliver Brett BBC News |
The glossy brochure in the travel agent's window does not always tell the whole story. How can holiday plans go so hideously wrong that people end up in the wrong country, or even the wrong continent?
In 1881 Robert Louis Stephenson came up with this nugget: "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour."
Samantha Lazzaris, a 33-year-old holistic therapist from Bristol, would beg to differ following a nightmarish holiday experience.
 Samantha Lazzaris was the victim of tour operator's error (Photo: SWNS) |
Having ended up 1,300 miles away from her intended holiday destination, she spent a night in Miami airport as she desperately tried to get to the right part of Central America.
Ms Lazzaris' problem stemmed from an error made by holiday giant Thomas Cook, where a member of staff had used the booking code for San Juan (SJU), Puerto Rico, instead of San Jose (SJO), capital of Costa Rica.
Frances Tuke, from the Association of British Travel Agents, says arriving in the wrong country in a case of mistaken identity is rare.
"That kind of thing is just human error," she says. "Usually it doesn't happen because someone will see the mistake beforehand. I remember a journalist who was trying to get to Recife in Brazil, rather than Arrecife in the Canary Islands - but he noticed the error and his travel plans were rectified."
Ms Lazzaris is definitely not alone. Her case is comfortably trumped by the experiences of a young London couple who thought they were on their way to Sydney, Australia, when they had in fact booked tickets to a former mining town in the north-east of Canada, also called Sydney.
Emma Nunn and Raoul Christian were both 19 when their flight from Heathrow, which they booked online, touched down in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2002.
Dhaka or Dakkar?
"We though we were going the long way, and that a big plane was going to turn up and take us to Australia," said Mr Christian. "But it did not quite happen that way."
After the couple's horror story was unearthed, a whole catalogue of mistaken destinations was disinterred. Tales included an army recruit being flown to Lisbon, Portugal, rather than Lisburn, Northern Ireland, and how a family living in Dhaka, Bangladesh, invited a friend over from Britain - who flew to Dakkar, west Africa.
Then there are the stories - apocryphal perhaps - of visitors regularly pitching up in the historic Oxfordshire village of Woodstock with a frown on their faces. Why? Because they had been expecting to witness the site of the 1969 festival of "three days of peace and music" - ie. Woodstock, New York.
The Americas can play particular havoc with travel plans that have not been detailed with the necessary precision.
Laura Rendell-Dunn, of Journey Latin America, said one group of tourists hoping to visit San Jose in Costa Rica had found themselves instead in San Jose, California - so had to ask the way to San Jose while already in San Jose.
"Often people confuse La Paz, Bolivia, with La Paz, Mexico," she adds.
 Hardly behaviour that's becoming of Woodstock, Oxon |
Other tourists hoping to see Santiago in Chile have booked tickets for San Diego, the city in southern California, thousands of miles to the north.
But with so much travel these days booked from the sanctuary of the bedside laptop, a slip of the mouse can be perilous. So what happens if you do make a vital error - putting the wrong name, the wrong date or, perish the thought, the wrong place?
Basically, it's often going to cost you.
But if you do find yourself in the wrong place you should console yourself that people have been wrestling with similarly named places for millennia.
Pity the merchant of antiquity who found himself setting out for Thebes in Egypt instead of Thebes in Greece. And woe betide the traveller who tried to find Caesarea in the Roman Empire without establishing whether it was the one in Judaea, the one in the Golan Heights, the one in Numidia, or the one in Cappadocia.
They couldn't simply shell out for an extra flight.
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