txflyer77

A few years back I flew SQ first class SIN-HND and enjoyed the champagne and scotch selection *far* too much. After clearing immigration I went to the ATM and withdrew 10k yen (about a hundred bucks).

I got in a cab and then in a drunken stupor thought I'd gotten the conversion wrong and actually withdrawn a *thousand* dollars.

I was so idiotically worried that I frantically posted to the Japan forum here asking where to get the best exchange rate to change the extra money back into USD.

Annalisa12

I'm too lazy to do miles. If someone else did it for me then I'd say yes do it for me.

I blame the surcharge on credit card payments here in Australia for it not being worth it.

pinniped

This reminds me of a mistake I made in the past year. More of a math mistake than a travel mistake...

I was in Hyderabad around a year ago and wanted to buy some pearls. So I asked my local business partner, a local guy, to take me to a nice place - somewhere he trusted would be legit and high-end. He knew of a few places that had been in business forever and were considered highly reputable. So we visit a shop, and we get taken into a nice private room and they start bringing out gorgeous strands of huge black pearls. Each one has a "retail" price on it in rupees, but of course we're going to negotiate as we go. In my head, I'm thinking I want to spend maybe a grand or so (U.S.), but I start doing all of the math in my head off by a factor of 10. Pretty soon, the jeweler has a million-plus in rupees (at the full retail price) on the table and we're starting to talk about a deal for the whole pile. Finally, the light bulb goes on: I've just asked the guy to bring out 10 times as much as I planned on buying, even after negotiation.

In the end, it wasn't too huge of a mistake because I figured out the error before we agreed on anything. I still made a nice purchase of about $1,200 at fair prices - not an insane deal but certainly better than I could have gotten in the U.S. The jeweler was happy, but it was a little embarrassing for me to briefly have him thinking I was there to drop $10k+. My business partner was with me, but he likely thinks I was just picky and wanted to look at a ton of pearls - not that I am incapable of correctly dividing big numbers by 60 instead of 600!

Jaimito Cartero

safari ari

Only if you don't use one in the end

Annalisa12

I like to use different airlines. SQ is a favourite and doesn't easily take me to the US for example. Maybe I can use SQ points on another airline. I have no idea.

Possibly that is the dumbest travel mistake I have made.

janders01

that's the worst EVER

mustang281man

Showed up to the airport (US) for a flight to Australia. Didn’t realize my Australian visa was over a year old so it was expired. Luckily I was able to get it online and only took about 10 minutes. I was in a bit of a panic though.

pbiflyer

Not me, but a co-worker.
He is from Europe, but has worked here in the US for decades on a green card. We had a work trip to Europe. He took his Austrian passport and checked in. The agent pointed out that his passport was to expire in a few days. He said, no, it doesn't expire until October. He'd been in the US so long that he read his European passport date of 10/02 as October 2nd, not February 10th!
Amazingly enough, he talked his way onto the flight. He did have a several hour drive through a snowstorm to the closest Austrian consulate to get an emergency renewal.

docbert

You do in Australia - Qantas FF costs A$90 (US$70) to join! Historically this free was difficult to avoid, although there's a number of ways to get it for free now days.

Jaimito Cartero

Astaroth

All of my real travel mistakes have been train related - probably because I triple check anything flight related despite trains often being more expensive.

The one that probably made me nervous was at about 15 I booked on a course with the cadets. After my place was confirmed I then got a warrant for a train ticket and went to the station to book my ticket & seat. All was good until the day before when packing/checking and spotted I'd booked the course in one city but the train to another. Went to the station but they said ticket was non-refundable etc and being a student I didnt have the $150 or so required for a replacement ticket (or $300 or so for a taxi between the two cities)

Similar thing happened later when I'd booked two sets of train tickets for different meetings and turned up on the day (a) the wrong set of tickets and (b) without my credit card so no way of paying the $350 for a replacement ticket. This was made worse by the fact I'd had to go cross London before getting to the mainline station and the wrong ticket had worked for this and so a week later when going for my second journey the ticket wouldnt work any more on the tube as the first swipe activated it for 24 hrs.

With air travel there's been minor mishaps with home printed tickets/boarding cards etc not being remembered but its just been a case of getting airlines or hotels etc to reprint them and so a 20 minute delay rather than anything material.

Have witnessed a few funny mistakes of others... long queue at immigration for the Eurotunnel, inc a queue to get into the queue. Get to the head of the first queue and have no choice but to go to the far left booth as the only one marked for non-EU passengers but also it had no vehicles waiting whereas all the EU ones had 20 odd vehicles each. So go across and it appears a few others think we've spotted a short cut as immediately a big queue forms behind us too. Unfortunately for them the french official didn't like my wife's hand written passport (inc the hand written extension in the middle of it) and took an age to clear us (with lost of frustrated people behind us)

MaxBuck

That's an interesting one. I'd be curious whether he had been in the States long enough that he thought in English rather than in German.

I was fascinated during my viewing of the last round of the Masters to hear Jon Rahm (a Spaniard who attended college on a golf scholarship at Arizona State) talking to himself, and his golf ball, in English.

ajGoes

That reminds me of my father's blunder involving both air and rail travel. Although we live thousands of miles apart, I happened to be at his house on the American west coast when his expensive European rail tickets arrived. I was surprised he'd gotten paper tickets, but I later learned they were probably the only option available at the time. At any rate, he and I met up in London a couple of months later. We got to our hotel, checked in, and went off for dinner. When we returned I noticed he was looking anxious as he searched for something among his bags.

It turned out that, anxious about whether he'd remembered his train tickets, he'd taken the vinyl folder out of the seat-back pocket he'd stashed it in on the flight over. The tickets were right there, in the pocket these folders have. If you've ever used such a folder for a while, you may remember that that pocket gets stretched over time -- to the point where, if you put an envelope of something like, say, train tickets in it, then stick the folder in a seat-back pocket upside down, the envelope can easily slide out when you retrieve it. This is apparently what happened to my poor old dad.

I spent much of the next few days of precious time abroad calling lost and found offices, visiting police stations, and finally, visiting the RailEurope office in the West End to file the insurance claim. The mishap ended up costing only around $120, if I remember correctly, thanks to the insurance, and I did get a memorable story out of it. Our wait at a London cop shop was entertaining as we watched a very dignified old drunk repeatedly assert his right to medical care despite the patient desk officer's pointing out that the gentleman was not, in fact, in a doctor's office. We didn't see Morse at the Oxford police station, but I had a feeling he had just slipped out the back....

mdkowals

Have a second one. Flying from PEK to STL via ORD a few years back. At PEK my boarding pass from PEK to ORD had "SSSS" printed on where it normally says "TSA Pre-Check". I didn't know what that meant at the time. My ORD-STL boarding pass was blank, no SSSS, no TSA-Precheck, nothing.

I get screened boarding the plane at PEK, realizing what the SSSS was. I justified to myself the that the other boarding pass was blank because a Chinese system won't necessarily print out a "TSA Pre-Check", since that's an American program.

We cross the pond landing at ORD Terminal 5, clear customs, wait for that one slow train to Terminal 3 - and then I notice the long line for security and no line at the kiosk. AHA!, I say to myself, I can throw this boarding pass away and print out a new one - I bet since I'm in the USA it will print with my TSA Pre-Check on it and I can breeze right through!

Nope. I throw away the blank, un-marked, boarding pass. Print out a new one, and sure enough, "SSSS" shows back up on my new ORD-STL boarding pass. A nearly three hour layover was consumed clearing customs, waiting for the ORD tram, and attempting to re-clear security for my domestic flight.