Wrong date

Like the wrong city switcheroo, the wrong date problem is an epidemic among air travelers. Part of the reason is simple absentmindedness: choosing the sixth month instead of the seventh month and then not reading the subsequent screens.

But part of the reason is that airline Web sites are anything but user-friendly. Reader Nancy Smythe wrote to me recently about her flight from West Palm Beach, Florida, to London, which she booked directly online through the airline. It turns out the carrier had sold her a ticket it couldn't deliver – her connection times were too short. So it agreed to rebook her on a later flight. But when it sent her the new ticket, it had the wrong date on it. When she pointed out the mistake, she was asked to pay a change fee. "This wasn't my error," she says. So why should she pay for it? Smythe's experience reveals the maddening secret of ticketing mistakes. The airline will try to make you pay for an error – even if it's not yours.

How to avoid it? Wake up and read the screen! No, seriously. This can usually be avoided by just reviewing your itinerary before you click the "book" button.

So look out for wrong names, wrong airlines, wrong cities, wrong dates and wrong expectations. Easy for me to say, right?

Wrong.

I've made every mistake in the book – and then some – when it comes to travel. All of the above errors are on my record. And let me also add that my mistakes aren't limited to travel. I have some big-time screw-ups to my name that extend into my professional and personal life. Hey, don't we all?

But as I look at the subject of mistakes in general, and ticketing mistakes in particular, I'm not worried about the ones we make once and learn from and are unlikely to repeat.

It's the ones that we make over and over for no other reason than that we're just easily manipulated – those are the screw-ups that infuriate me.

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TRAVEL/traveltips/05/15/ticketing.errors/index.html

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