10 travel mistakes and what we learned from them

Bankruptcies, bad luck and breakdowns. In the last blog post about the big trip, I reported on our highlights. But even we were not immune to mishaps, mistakes and breakdowns along the way. During our six-month journey, we experienced one or two unpleasant moments. And since we learn from mistakes, I don’t want to deprive you of this “dark side” of travel. These are our ten biggest travel mistakes of the past six months:

p.s. Attention – for once there are no pictures to scroll through ;)

#10 The Money Thing

One scenario I wanted to avoid on the road was suddenly finding myself without money. For this reason, I had packed a whole arsenal of possible cash withdrawals; Credit cards, Maestro cards, Travel Cash cards as well as cash (in dollars and euros) as an emergency reserve. For me, the most cost-effective way to get cash in the respective national currency is to withdraw cash with the Maestro card at the ATM. And so we usually looked for an ATM at the airport that accepts Maestro cards. In order for cash withdrawals abroad to work with the Maestro card, I had to activate the respective countries in advance. Depending on the bank, you can activate the activation in online banking or notify the bank of the desired adjustments by phone. Since I had to unlock some countries for the six-month trip and this change was only supposed to be temporary, I did this in advance by phone.

Unfortunately, I forgot one country: South Korea! At Seoul airport, I was quite irritated at first when my card didn’t work. Soon it dawned on me that I probably hadn’t listed this country on the phone. “No problem,” I thought, opened my online banking and wanted to add South Korea manually. But no indication – once you have made a temporary activation via bank, no manual changes are possible during the corresponding period (at least at my bank). With credit cards and travel cash cards as an alternative, we were fortunately not left high and dry. Nevertheless, I was annoyed that I hadn’t neatly listed all countries for activation via phone. Next time, I would prefer to activate it via online banking. There I have to make a reminder to switch off again after the trip, but I am more flexible on the road and save myself an expensive phone call to Switzerland.

#9 Don’t pay attention to holidays

If I travel over Easter, Ascension Day or Pentecost, I am aware that these are holidays and I take this into account when planning (many travelers, overcrowded trains, changed opening hours, higher prices…). However, when organizing our six-month trip, I never once checked whether there would be any special celebrations in the destinations we visited. And so I dabbed my planned travel period for Bolivia exactly the carnival week. In many Bolivian cities, the carnival is celebrated extensively – restaurants and museums are closed for several days and on some days there are no buses. This fact required us to replan the itinerary at short notice. The planned detour to Uyuni fell through because there were no buses on the day in question.

I had better luck in Japan – I only realized on the way that our departure day from Japan to China is exactly the first day of the infamous Golden Week, which you avoid as a tourist if possible. Thus, unconsciously, everything was done right.

I was also unaware that we would be traveling to northern China, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan during Ramadan. Ramadan is not carried out as strictly in this area as in Iran or Saudi Arabia, but the topic is of course present.

It is therefore worthwhile to briefly consult the most important holidays of the respective destination when planning your trip and to adjust the route or time planning accordingly.

#8 Plan
without regard to opening hours

The same applies to the opening hours of attractions and museums. It’s stupid if you visit a place because of a very specific attraction and then find out that the attraction is closed on that day of all days. This is exactly what almost happened to us in Nukus (Uzbekistan). My motivation for the detour to Nukus was the Karakalpakstan Museum of Art. As I went through our schedule in the planning phase, I realized that we will be in Nukus on Sunday/Monday and Monday is critical at museums. The short online check as well as the look at the travel guide calmed me down. “Open on Mondays” I read there.

Our Uzbek tour guide was also of the opinion that we should go to Nukus on Sunday and visit the museum on Monday afternoon (according to his program suggestion). But somehow I didn’t like it. One day before leaving for Nukus, I scoured the internet again for reliable information. And lo and behold: after several searches, I found the current version of the website (two versions of the museum can be found on the Internet and only one of them is up to date) and it said: “Monday – day off”. Thanks to my meticulous research, I spared our tour guide a rather embarrassing moment…

#7 Nasty Stones When Driving

I was so proud that I survived our month-long road trip through Patagonia without a puncture or burst tires (my specialty). Who would have thought that a few days later in San Pedro de Atacama a ridiculous stone would get in my way. Actually, I just wanted to have a look at the endemic cacti and manoeuvred off the gravel road. Unfortunately, I touched a higher stone while reversing. The small impact caused the exhaust to shift upwards. Since I didn’t realize this right away and kept driving, the heat from the exhaust burned some of the plastic protection and damaged one of the two reversing sensors. The damage caused by this would have cost me 500 CHF. Fortunately, I have travel insurance for such cases (via my Miles & More credit card), which processed this case relatively quickly and refunded me the money after a good month.

#6 The pitfalls are in the details. Jiayuguan is not Jiuquan

Travelling by train in China is basically not an extremely complicated story. The most important key data (train number and time) can be deciphered and the respective stop is also displayed in English on the express trains. Mistakes happen when two towns are very close to each other and you only take a cursory look at the English display.

Jiayuguan and Jiuquan are less than ten minutes apart by train, and since the friend said “we are here” and the GPS signal of my smartphone showed some location in the pampas (in China the GPS was often disturbed), I followed him with bag and baggage without a corresponding control look to the scoreboard. Just as our train starts up again, I spot the town sign and read “Jiuquan” instead of “Jiayuguan”. This mishap necessitated a phone call to the travel agency as we were expected in Jiayuguan by a local tour guide and the use of 100 yuan for the taxi ride from Jiuquan to Jiayuguan. After all, we now know that even with zero knowledge of Chinese far away from Shanghai and Beijing, you can easily make a taxi driver understand where you want to go.

#5 Why does the ferry leave too early?

With both the train and the ferry, if we’ve learned anything, it’s that public transport usually doesn’t arrive or leave a place before the scheduled time. Even in punctual Japan, it’s a red flag when the ferry sets sail 15 minutes before the scheduled departure time. I have already reported on this mistake (which did not only grow on our crap, after all, two people checked our tickets) in the Yakushima blog post. Nicely, the captain made an extra round to the harbor so that we could catch the right ferry in time.

#4 Help, we’re at the wrong airport!

Imagine you enter an airport, look at the departures board to locate the check-in counter and can’t find your flight. You look and look and look and … It just doesn’t exist! «Huh?!» That’s exactly what happened to us at Incheon Airport. To be on the safe side, I consulted my smartphone to check the flight data and suddenly the friend said “he doesn’t fly from here at all!”.

I had booked the Shanghai-Seoul-Beijing flight directly on China Southern’s website and automatically assumed that we would (logically) depart from Seoul where we arrived. If I had studied my ticket carefully, I would have realized that Seoul uses two different airport codes: ICN for Incheon and GMP for Gimpo. A bit perfidious, isn’t it? Luckily, Gimpo International Airport is only 40 minutes by metro from Incheon International Airport. Since we were in Incheon that morning almost three hours before the departure time, we had enough time to take the metro to the right airport. However, in order to avoid this moment of greatly increased pulse rate when determining “help – wrong airport!!”, it is worth studying tickets and flight routes carefully.

#3 Oops, flight booked in the wrong month

For our six-month trip, I had booked a total of 18 individual flights. For the island hopping in Hawaii alone, four flights were necessary, as there are no ferries between the islands (the Big Island and Maui are actually not that far apart). I had a slight panic with all bookings (including hotels) that I would mix up the day or month in a careless moment or slip a line in my Excel spreadsheet, which I used for travel planning.

When booking the flight Oahu – Kauai, I actually made a date mistake. I had chosen the right day – but a month too early. Luckily, the friend noticed this mistake and we were able to make a correction with the airline for a fee of $50. I would think that ended lightly.

#2 Thrills due to swapped first and last names

For about 50% of all booked flights, we received information about flight schedule changes by e-mail in advance. Sometimes it was only a matter of minutes, sometimes of hours and Star Peru happily cancelled our flight and rebooked us on another flight more or less without comment. None of these changes required a response from our side (with the exception of clicking on a link on All Nippon Airways for the Honolulu – Tokyo flight). So I didn’t think anything special when Turkish Airlines informed us by email that the departure time of our flight Tashkent-Istanbul would be postponed by five minutes (!) from 8:15 a.m. to 8:20 a.m.

When I wanted to check in online the day before departure, a bright red sign on the online check-in page informed me that we had to confirm our flight via telephone hotline, otherwise we could not be checked in. I was very annoyed by this cumbersome handling, as I incur such high telephone costs. But it got even better: We first contacted the German hotline number of Turkish Airlines with our request. But the lady on the other end of the line refused to confirm the flight. The reason: I had swapped my first and last names when I entered them. Until that moment, I wasn’t even aware of this fact. This error is not apparent on the Turkish Airlines ticket confirmation. The lady said that we had to fill out a feedback form and that there was nothing she could do except book us a new flight (but the Tashkent-Istanbul flight was already fully booked). The fact that our flight takes place in less than 24 hours and that I only have to call because of a five-minute schedule change caused by the airline didn’t interest her one bit. The cost of this consultation: 40 CHF.

In the second attempt, we tried the Turkish hotline number of Turkish Airlines. The gentleman we now had at the aperture was much more helpful. He didn’t mention the swapped first and last names at all, confirmed our flight and informed us about the new ticket numbers, with which the online check-in worked perfectly afterwards.

The only critical point was to get the tickets for the flight Tashkent-Istanbul (they were not available online) and to get through passport control. Less critical for me than for the friend. Since he has two first names, his last name was only ticked off on the ticket due to the swapped entry. As expected, the lady at the check-in counter did not find us in the system and so I pulled out my smartphone with the confirmed tickets including seat number. She checked it again and said “Oh, now I got you”. We breathed a sigh of relief and made it through passport control and onto the plane without any problems.

Conclusion: Airline hotlines are hell! And the lady at the German hotline was – sorry for the word – under all the. Yes, it’s my fault that I swapped first and last names. But after the booking has been made, I have no chance to notice this mistake and the fact that I can’t check in without a hotline call due to a flight schedule change of 5 minutes, I find almost unbelievable. In the end, we flew from Tashkent to Zurich without any problems with our first and last names swapped. Without the theatre of said lady, this would probably only be a side note, because we were not found in the system right away.

Die Kosten für die beiden Telefonate belaufen sich auf 90 CHF. Turkish Airlines antwortete folgendermassen auf meine schriftliche Beschwerde: The costs you incurred during your telephone call are determined by your provider as a result of the type of contract you have. Turkish Airlines has no influence over the costs made. Having made the explanation above, we would recommend you to seek contact with your provider in order to obtain more information regarding the charges. On the other hand, when your flights are affected by a scheduled change, this change has to be approved by the passenger. Was bitteschön kann mein Telefonanbieter dafür, dass man bei euch wegen einer Flugplanänderung von 5 Minuten eine Hotline kontaktieren muss?!

#1 Costly typo when booking a flight

Airline hotlines are hell for the second time; About two months before our departure for Chile, I realized a stupid careless mistake. When booking our flight from Zurich via London/Toronto to Chile, I had mistyped my friend’s last name by one letter. Or rather, I had forgotten a letter. Glauser quickly became Glauer. “Stupid, but not so wild,” I thought and informed the airline via hotline about this mistake and the desired adjustment. I was of the opinion that such a minimal correction (1 letter) could be done without any problems for a processing fee. But this thought was far too optimistic. I had booked the flight directly with Air Canada and contacted the Air Canada hotline accordingly. They said that it was not possible to make this adjustment because the flight from Zurich to London (i.e. the first and shortest of the three flights booked) was a codeshare flight with Swiss and Air Canada could not make an adjustment for Swiss flights and therefore the name change would not be carried out on any of the three flights. Do you have to understand something like that? No, right?!

For me, the question arose whether I wanted to risk taking the flight despite the typo? According to various sources, IATA theoretically has a tolerance of up to three incorrect/missing letters. However, when changing planes twice and flying over the USA, where additional passenger data is required, I did not find this variant so exciting. I was also afraid that the person on the hotline had made a note to this effect when we booked.

I was faced with the following two options: do nothing and shiver or make a new booking in a higher category so that the ticket price I had already paid would be fully credited to me. If I had rebooked in the same ticket class, the ticket price I had already paid would not have been fully credited. In addition, the economy from Toronto to Santiago de Chile was already fully booked and airline hotlines (at least the various ladies and gentlemen I had on the line at Air Canada) are not able to carry out such cancellations/new bookings easily. In the end, I booked us new (more expensive) Premium Economy tickets. Not nice for the travel budget, but at least worthwhile on the long way from Zurich to Santiago de Chile.

Control, control, control

When I look at all these mishaps and mistakes, I doubt my intelligence a tiny bit. Mistyping names, forgetting letters, confusing dates and otherwise being a bit clumsy on the road. But hey, at least I booked all 180 hotel nights correctly and picked out really nice accommodations. I also didn’t make a mistake in checking the entry requirements and organizing the visas.

My lesson from these 10 travel mistakes is that I have flight bookings checked by a second pair of eyes before entering the payment information if possible (the proven four-eyes principle) and prefer to mention my intended destination once again to a conductor, controller or other supervisor. Maybe this will help to reduce the error rate on future trips.

And now, of course, I’m surprised what mishaps have happened to you while traveling?