Story highlights
UK couple book flights from Birmingham, Alabama instead of Birmingham, UK
Many other travelers have ended up in wrong cities, wrong countries and wrong continents
A British couple set off on a dream vacation to Las Vegas – only to discover they’d booked flights from Birmingham, Alabama, rather than Birmingham, UK.
Richella Heakin, 26, from the Birmingham suburb of Sutton Coldfield, saved for two years to get together $1,750 for the trip as a surprise 30th birthday present for her boyfriend Ben Marlow, the BBC has reported.
But when they found the check-in desks at the UK airport closed, staff explained to them that the BHM airport code on their tickets meant Alabama – rather the English city’s BHX code.
The couple had planned to fly from the UK Birmingham to Dallas, Texas and then on to Nevada’s Sin City.
MORE: Insider Guide: Best of Las Vegas
Heakin told the BBC that the error occurred after doing “a lot of clicking” on booking site lastminute.com.
Although the couple were unable to get a refund, they bought late flights to Amsterdam instead.
MORE: Insider Guide: Best of Amsterdam
The latest in a long line of mix-ups
You’d think with all the technology at our disposal, destination mix-ups like Heakin and Marlow’s would be a rarity.
Not so.
They’re surprisingly common.
In February 2015 Ghanaian student Emmanuel Akomanyi won a scholarship to study medicine in Guyana.
But his journey didn’t go quite as expected.
He couldn’t get a direct flight to Guyana so he boarded a plane in Ghana to Guarulhos International Airport in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
There, he bought a ticket to his final destination in Guyana – a South American country on the Caribbean coast bordering Surinam, Venezuela and Brazil.
But when he got off the plane, he was not in Guyana – he was in the city of Goiania, Brazil – almost 3,000 kilometers away from where he needed to go.
Akomanyi spent a week in Brazil, supported by strangers as he had no money.
The airline that sold him the original ticket eventually helped him out with a new flight to Guyana’s Cheddi Jagan International Airport, near the capital Georgetown.
In June of 2014, a couple boarded a plane to the southern Caribbean island of Grenada, instead of their desired destination – the ancient city of Granada, Spain.
U.S. dentist Edward Gamson thought he’d bought tickets from London’s Gatwick Airport to Granada, Spain, for himself and his partner via a British Airways booking agent, but only realized he was actually headed to Grenada in the Caribbean once on board, reported The Independent.
The destination country and flight duration hadn’t been listed on his e-tickets, which instead displayed only the city name.
“It’s just so sad,” Gamson told The Independent. “A trip we had been really looking forward to was ruined and … BA won’t do the decent thing.”
Gamson claimed the airline refused to reimburse his first-class tickets and didn’t reroute the travelers to Granada from Grenada.
He ended up suing British Airways for the cost of the trip, including planned tours in Spain that he and his partner didn’t get to take, but the case was reportedly dismissed.
READ: Doh! 20 biggest travel mistakes
Grenada, Granada
Remarkably, the same mix-up happened earlier that same month.
Lamenda Kingdon from Plymouth, UK, had also booked a British Airways flight to Granada, Spain, but found herself on a flight bound for Grenada in the Caribbean.
She’d planned the trip after being diagnosed with cancer.
When notified of the mistake, the BA crew moved Kingdon to first class and sent her back to Gatwick when the flight made a scheduled stop in St. Lucia, reported the Daily Mail.
“I genuinely don’t blame anyone,” she told the Daily Mail. “The person on the other end of the phone probably just misheard me. I honestly didn’t notice the spelling difference.”
Wrong continent
In May 2013, Sandy Valdivieso and her husband, Triet Vo, boarded a Turkish Airlines flight in Los Angeles, intending to travel to Dakar, Senegal, in western Africa, but ended up in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
The mix-up was due to the similar sounding destinations and airport codes.
The couple didn’t realize the error until they were already on their connecting flight from Istanbul.
“When the flight attendant said we were heading to Dhaka, we believed that this was how you pronounced ‘Dakar’ with a Turkish accent,” Valdivieso told the LA Times.
READ: Most annoying things people do on planes
Wrong state
In December 2013, 85-year-old Maria Nieves ended up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after she’d booked a Southwest Airlines flight to Fort Myers, Florida.
It was the second time such a mix-up had happened to her – two years ago, the airline flew Nieves to Tampa, Florida, instead of New Orleans, Louisiana.
According to Louisiana’s WAFB, Nieves had requested wheelchair assistance, which meant airline staff were responsible for assisting her from gate to gate.
“I can see it happening once, but twice to the same person, it’s kind of like lightning striking twice in the same place,” her son Robert Ortiz told WAFB.
Wrong airport
Last June, a VietJet Air plane that took off from Hanoi landed at the wrong airport.
Instead of arriving in Cam Ranh Airport near Nha Trang, the aircraft landed 140 kilometers away in Da Lat.
The airline flew the misdirected passengers to their original destination via another flight, reported local news outlet Thanh Nien News.
In January earlier that year, another Southwest Airlines plane landed at a small airport in Taney County, Missouri, approximately seven miles from where it was meant to land at Branson Airport.
Due to the difference in airport runway lengths – Taney County airport’s runway is 3,738 feet compared with Branson Airport’s 7,140 feet – pilots were forced to brake hard when the plane touched down.
No one was hurt and the airline refunded all tickets and provided future travel credit for passengers.
Originally published June 2014, updated April 2016.