How close does it have to be to qualify as a close call?
 

OK, so I was staying at the Oberoi in Bombay two weeks ago. I have stayed in the Islamabad Marriott (well, four years ago). My go-to hotel in Istanbul for years used to be the Swissotel Bosphorus, which in 2001 was taken over by Chechen terrorists for a few days. And so on.

I know it's ridiculous to call any of these "close calls," but how close is really close?

One day, plus or minus. Otherwise you were never really close. ;)

I felt a bit strange having left BKK a couple weeks prior to the coup that started the current series of events a couple years ago. I thought about it for a few minutes and then got over it. Some days are better than others; that's about all we can go for. When the time comes, not much we can do about it one way or another. Have fun and do good in the meantime.

In your case, you might qualify as a "predictive tool" if those trips mentioned (and alluded to) above comprise, say, ~90% or so of your int'l travel.
In that case, it would be rather freaky, but still not very valuable in terms of timelining.
On the other hand, if you travel int'l frequently, then yeah, rather insignificant, but good conversation fodder.

I travel internationally about 8-9x a year, visiting on average ~18 countries and maybe 30 cities total, so no, not a predictive tool. That's three hotels out of the 50 or so I hit on a regular basis. But still a little unsettling! It's just the nature of the travel I do.

Well, I cancelled a trip to Chengdu the morning one day before the Sichuan earthquake due to a last minute change to a client meeting. I was an hour away from leaving and would have been in the western part of Chengdu at a factory 24 hours later when the quake hit.

Instead, I was in a skyscraper in Shanghai and the worst I experienced was motion sickness due to the swaying of the building.

It could have been a VERY different trip.

A true close call would need to be described using the words: "I would have been there myself if it hadn't been for... [insert something unlikely that happened to you]".

NB - it really has to be something unlikely. It wouldn't work if you said: "I would have been there myself if it hadn't been for... the fact that I have a job in Scotland that doesn't involve any foreign travel at all".

On October 1, 2005, 6:50 PM local time, I was on the 4th floor of the Kuta Square shopping mall in Bali when the bomb went off on the 1st floor. Didn't even notice it, and initially thought that the announcement broadcast over the department store PA system was some super discount sales promotion... until a security guard came to usher us away. No carnage visible outside, people milling about randomly, somebody said it was just an LPG can bursting in a restaurant, so we shrugged our shoulders and headed back to the hotel. I took a nice long shower, turned on the TV (nothing on the local channels), flipped on my phone... and only then, when the "ZOMG ZOMG R U OK!?" SMSes started coming in and I tuned into CNN, did I find out what had happened.

Funny thing is, it didn't really faze me then, and doesn't faze me now. Terrorism, like plane crashes, is just such an exceedingly unlikely and essentially random uncontrollable event that it's just not worth worrying about; instead, the top 3 things that will actually kill you are health, road accidents and yourself (suicide).

I once stayed at the old Pera Palas in Galata/Istambul, the same place that James Bond was involved in a set-to with KGB ops, a honey pot, etc., but noticed not a thing except for a number of folks who did not look like regulars at the Motel 6.

Close call is misconnecting for one of the 9/11 flights, or staying next door to one of the Mumbai hotels affected.

In my case just a couple of times when a bomb has gone off several blocks away (Madrid and London).

I've never had what I considered a close call.

A friend who lives in Israel got off a bus which then went less than a block before it blew up. That's a close call.

In Baghdad during the start of Gulf War no. 2.

I flew in October '01 from BWI down to TPA and started talking to the guy next to me. He was on one of those flights. He had actually boarded the flight when his pager went off and he deplaned to deal with a different client than the one he was flying to see. That qualifies as a close call in my book.

In London, when I step off the curb looking in the wrong direction.

I was in Nepal for a week in January 2005. Heading to the airport on 1/31 I noticed that there were a lot of soldiers in the street. "It's nothing to worry about," said my guide, "probably getting ready for another Maoist protest."

Next day the king takes over the government in a coup, shuts down the airports, and cuts off all of the phone lines and internet connections in the country.

Probably wouldn't've been in any danger (I would've just demanded/begged my guide to take me to my embassy) but would not have been fun by any means.

My closest - I was booking vacation time to Thailand but needed some (smallish) issue resolved before the final payments were made. Can't recall why, but for some reason the TA didn't get back to us in time so we decided to go to Vietnam instead. So on Dec 26 I was sitting in a hotel in Saigon instead of sitting on a beach in Phuket when the tsunami hit.

:D I did that my first time in London and about got flattened by a double decker bus. Thank God for horns ;)

Works both ways. Similar thing happened to me in Athens, Greece.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=52035

I didn't "misconnect" strictly speaking, but I think that was pretty darn close... :)

Not myself, but my parents friends from NZ were on one of their recent RTWs back in London in June '05 and she forgot her jacket on the way to the tube one morning. So they headed back to the hotel to pick it up.

Apparently while on the way back, a few malcontents decided it was a fine time to blow up the station where they otherwise would have been standing. If not for her jacket, there's a good chance they would have been in the middle of it.

And I thought rolling a backhoe down a hill was a big adventure adventure post-75.

I was in St Louis back in April, exactly a week before the earthquake hit.

An armed gang of crackheads fired into our house five times while we were in it, the breeze from a passing bullet lifting the hair in my husband's bangs. I'd call that close. A 20,000 pound oak tree fell on our next house while we were in it, and one of the limbs that slammed through the roof actually pushed my husband forward toward me in the direction of the kitchen. I'd call that close.

In 1972 the Howard Johnson sniper in New Orleans supposedly gunned down 19 people. (I say supposedly because some of the shots may have been friendly fire, memory fades now.) I had to walk past the Howard Johnson every day to go to work 1981-1982. My mom said, you guessed it: "Don't walk near the Howard Johnson." I probably made my mom very sad with my recklessness but I'd call that "not close."

Bazillions of people walk past, stay in, or have meetings in big hotels in big cities. We may get a little shiver of mortality but it doesn't mean we were really that close. It does give you a funny feeling though, doesn't it?

A friend of mine told me a story of her dad having a real close call when she was a kid (which would make it some time in 1970s). He was flying somewhere on business and sitting near the gate started reading a book that he got totally involved in and he missed the boarding of his flight which crashed. This was way before cell phones so he didn't think to call his wife to tell her he got re-booked to the next flight and for several hours she thought he died in the crash. My friend told me ever since then he called his wife before and after every single flight.

I've never had a flying related close call, my two close calls were losing control of my bike riding on the shoulder of the road and swerving into the car lane in the short span between cars (instead of into a car) and also many many moons ago losing control on a wet road of my rented car which turned out to have had bald tires and going off the highway into a field on the side of the road when half a mile further down it would have been a sharp drop off a cliff on the same side of that highway.

Ever since introduction of e-fares, my common weekend trips were out Saturday back Monday or Tuesday morning. I'm in SFO my parents used to be near EWR, so I'd taken United 93 EWR-SFO on Monday or Tuesday mornings a few times in 1999/2000/2001 time frame. That one really gave me pause.

I was slated to leave London on December 20/21, 1988. I chose the earlier date because I had not seen my wife in 3 weeks. I flew out on Pan Am 103 the day before it went down. I still have the ticket stub someplace. I think this is the reason my wife is adamant that I call her before and after each flight.