I
reckon it must truly suck to be in the travel trade. You
won’t BELIEVE the fuss passengers make, just because
some teeny tiny mistake has been made which has led
to them being taken to, say, the wrong country. Why
quibble? They said they would take you to another country,
and they did. Variety is the spice of life, as the Bible says. No,
wait. I think it was Rod Stewart.
I share this thought after reading in the newspaper
about a pair of holidaymakers who were mistakenly flown
to the wrong CONTINENT. Triet Vo and his wife Sandy
of Los Angeles booked tickets to Dakar in Africa, but were
taken instead to Dhaka in Bangladesh. The nit-picking
couple made a huge fuss, pointing out that Africa and Asia
were on different continents, 11,000 kilometres apart.
That is technically true, but they’re on the same planet,
right? You have to give the airlines credit for something.
The couple, whose story I learned from a news report
forwarded by reader Jessica Mudditt in Bangladesh, said they
were watching the Flight Info channel on the seat-back video
when they noticed the plane heading past Africa towards
Asia, according to a
Los Angeles Times
report about the
incident. My jaw dropped at this. Someone actually watched
the Flight Info channel! Surely this is a first?
Anyway, the fact is, most people stink at geography
these days. You may know that when the bad guys in the
Boston Marathon bombing were revealed to be Chechen,
the US internet community launched vitriolic attacks on
Czech Republic websites.
The horrified Czech ambassador pointed out that there
was no connection of any sort between Chechnya and his
country, which aren’t even near each other, but internet
haters brushed this aside as irrelevant. The ambassador
had made the fatal mistake of expecting a modicum of
reasonableness in web-based discussions, when in reality
you’d be lucky to get an iota, jot, tittle or speck.
But let’s look at the bright side: at least Mr and Mrs Vo
ended up more or less in the SAME HEMISPHERE as
their intended destination, sort of, if you hold the globe in
exactly the right position.
Trading places
When travelling, at least try to get to the correct
continent, implores father-of-three
Nury Vittachi.
The same cannot be said for a couple from Italy who
boarded a flight in July 2009 intending to go to Sydney,
Australia.
They ended up in Sydney, Canada. This is quite
possibly the furthest distance they could possibly get from
where they meant to go – about 17,000 kilometres.
The only way the travel trade could make a bigger
mix-up would be to accidentally send people into space.
Virgin Atlantic boss Richard Branson is currently working
on this. (“Fasten your seatbelts as we are about to land on
Mars.” “But I bought a ticket to Venus!”)
A European reader tells me that so many people go to
Austria instead of Australia that Vienna shops are full of
t-shirts saying: “No kangaroos in Austria.”
My jaw dropped at this.
Someone actually watched
the Flight Info channel!
Surely this is a first?
I was mulling this over when I got home and found my
wife searching internet sites for cheap tickets from Asia to
London. She was amazed at the variety of prices.
I pointed out that there were at least 28 Londons in the
world, including places of that name in Ontario, Belize,
Limpopo and Finland.
“How do I know I have the right one?” she asked.
Typical female thinking! I told her to just pick the
cheapest one.
Variety is the spice of life, right?
Nury Vittachi welcomes your ideas and comments at
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