[Cedric_Statherby]

There is much opportunity for making fun of foreigners here. But here is a true story in which I was the ignorant one:

I was due to travel from London to Santiago, Chile for a conference with a colleague. He booked his flight via Madrid, leaving by the Tuesday afternoon to be there in time for our Wednesday afternoon speaking slots. My ticket however was for a Wednesday morning departure. We debated this just before he left.

“You’ll never get there in time. It’s too far”.

“But that’s the routing I have been given”.

“Where are you going via?” (We both had two-leg journeys as there were no direct flights from London to Santiago then – in fact the journey still requires a change even today).

“Phoenix”.

“Phoenix?! Show me your ticket” – this being in the era of paper tickets.

And there it was: the ticket was for London to Phoenix, Arizona and thence to San Diego, California. Santiago, San Diego – tomato, tomayto: the perils of working for an American company with American central travel planning, for whom the two cities sound very similar.

It took some pretty dramatic last minute scrambling to rectify that one!

[TimFitzgeraldTC]

When I was working in Sydney I had a client want to travel to Hamburg. Gave me dates / details and booked as he requested along with a hotel. The day after he was due to arrive he got in touch to say he needed to reroute ticket as he had turned up at the hotel and asked how he would get to the address he had printed out. Hotel then told him he was several hundred miles from where he needed to be. His appointment was in Homburg – in the south of Germany.

Anyway hotel didn’t charge him cancellation fee in understanding of the problem, and helped him sort a domestic flight. I then re-routed him back from Stuttgart and he said he would pay more attention in future to where he needed to be – he just assumed it was the same place.

—

On a personal level (a la Ryanair) we turned up at Tangier for a ferry to Spain 4 years ago. We got there the night before (luckily) as when we arrived we discovered Tangier Med is 60Km away. They ran an hourly free coach but it did shock us – so we got up extra early and got that the next morning. We had stayed a 2 minute walk from Tangier Docks!!

[IanFromHKG]

Last year we had some American colleagues doing the Far East tour, and they sent me their proposed itinerary. This suggested that we could fly out of HK on a Wednesday morning and have a series of meetings in Tokyo in the afternoon

It took me a depressingly long time to convince them that a first flight departure at 9am, a 4.5-hour flight, a one-hour time difference, and a minimum one-hour transfer into downtown Tokyo (from Narita), was going to make that a bit of a challenge. They insisted that it couldn’t take that long to get to Tokyo. Because, of course, Hong Kong is in Japan, isn’t it?

[Author]

Posts