One of the first successes of the Web was on-line travel — the elimination (”disintermediation” was the term during the Bubble Years) of the travel agent, allowing you to book your own travel. I do this every week, though not always perfectly. There have been a few times when I booked a room on the wrong day — clicking next Wednesday instead of this Wednesday on the little pop-up calendar — but nothing quite as monumental as reported in this Reuters’ story.
A 21-year-old German tourist used the Web to book a flight from Berlin to Sydney, Australia to see his girlfriend. Unfortunately, he typed in SDY for his destination, rather than SYD. SDY is the 3-letter code for Sidney-Richland Municipal Airport in Sidney, Montana. Dressed for Australian summer, he stepped off the plane in northeastern Montana winter in a t-shirt and shorts. He spent 3 days in Billings, MT before he could buy a ticket from SDY to SYD with money wired from Germany. The final line in the story is this quote from his mother — “I didn’t notice the mistake as my son is usually good with computers”
It’s been a few months since the liquid restrictions went into place, and not everyone flies as often as I do (I’m averaging 3 out of every 4 weeks in the air), so I can understand when someone in front of me in the TSA screening line doesn’t quite have the “travel-size toiletries in the Ziploc bag” thing down to a science.
However, smoking was banned on most domestic airlines in 1990. So I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for the woman who caused an emergency landing because, according to the USA Today article, “she struck matches in an attempt to conceal body odor”. I’ve sat next to more than my share of smelly people in my years of flying and thought about offering some of the more rank a shot from my deodorant can, but lighting matches? I stopped that in college — before they banned smoking on airplanes.
Recorded in the TravelCommons studio after a week in the Bay Area and a tough struggle to get back home in the teeth of the first winter storm of the season. A listener passes along the story of a trip as an inadvertent stowaway. I walk through the timelime of my efforts to get home to Chicago and, in the Travel Tech segment, talk about two wireless applications I use every day. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file.
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