Even professional travelers sometimes get things wrong.  Sometimes, those things end up going well anyway; sometimes they go down in flames.  I have teamed up with twelve of my favorite travel bloggers to share our amazing and embarrassing moments when travel has gone wrong.  Why thirteen of us?  Unlucky seems to be a common theme here!

My Story

I am a planner when it comes to my travel.  I like to know what I am doing, when I am doing it, how I am getting there, and such.  On my recent trip to Madrid, I had an incredible day trip to El Escorial planned.  I would take the train (an hour and a half), walk up the hill to the monastery (a half hour in bitter cold), and spend the morning exploring one of the most beautiful buildings I had ever seen.

The first part of the trip went perfectly.  The train was on time, and I didn’t get lost walking up the hill.  The monastery was indeed gorgeous, and I spent about 30 minutes taking pictures from every angle before making my way to the entrance… only to find out it was closed on Mondays.  So I turned around, walked back down the hill, and sat on a long train ride back to Madrid.  About four hours of travel for a sight that I didn’t get to see makes this a pretty frustrating story, but at least the outside pictures came out well!

Jub from Tiki Touring Kiwi

After grabbing my shoulder from behind, I figured the current situation could escalate when the policeman started repeating ‘terrorist’ and ‘passport’ in among a whole lot of Turkish. My lack of Turkish made this Antalya encounter pretty nerve wracking. When he realized I didn’t have my passport on me, his other English word happened to be ‘deport’. Not the two words you want to hear in a foreign country (though a part of me wanted to know if I got to choose the country I’d be deported to). After a few minutes, the policeman was quite animated, until perhaps in a silly move I pretended to film the encounter, which wound him up even more. Eventually I convinced him I was not a terrorist and said I’d return to my hostel (not that he knew what I was saying… the one time Google Translate would be most helpful). Afterwards a local came up to me and we had a good laugh about the scene. I didn’t ask him why he didn’t come over to help translate, rather than just watching. Pro tip: take a photo of your passport, so if you don’t carry yours everywhere you can still show a photo which was acceptable for later police checks.

Tom from Travel Tom Tom

I have traveled around Thailand 17 times now, but I will never forget my first time and the most stupid travel mistake I made back then while renewing my Thailand visa. Arriving at Bangkok Airport will get you a 30 day visa for Thailand but more than 10 years ago I wanted to travel around for about 6 weeks so at some point I had to do a visa run. I still had 16 days left on my visa but as I was traveling fairly close to the Myanmar border I decided to do my visa run. The new 30 days would be exactly enough to complete my Thailand itinerary. It took me more than a day to get to Ranong and finally Myanmar and the trip cost me about $40. As soon as the immigration guy stamped my passport I was like: no sir you must be making a mistake! My visa was valid until May 20, I just did a visa run and now you stamp my passport with a new visa ending May 18. Sorry, new rules: when you travel overland into Thailand you only get 15 days on your visa!

Shandos from Travelnuity

One of the easiest and most enjoyable ways to travel around Europe is by train. However, despite seeming so easy, there are a few catches that you need to be aware of. The trickiest of all are trains that split in half, mid-journey. After reading about this in a blog post while in Belgium, I congratulated myself on picking this up a few days later on the train to Bruges. But fast-forward a few months later, and it was my turn to experience a travel fail while traveling to the historic town of Quedlinburg in the center of Germany.

I’d already been in Germany for a few weeks, catching trains nearly every day, and had not been aware that trains in Germany also split in half. So, when puzzled about the display of two route numbers and destinations on the station display board, I simple figured the train must change route number part way through the journey, after my destination, and boarded the train. However, after the train stopped at one station for an inordinately long period of time, when it finally departed, I had a funny feeling. Looking at Google Maps on my phone, I realized we were heading in the opposite direction, and used my limited German to confirm that indeed our train had split and I was on the wrong half!

There was nothing I could do except wait until we arrived at the next station 10 minutes later, then catch the next train back, and an hour later get on the correct half of the train to Quedlinburg. Unfortunately, we only had the afternoon to explore the beautiful old town full of half-timbered houses, and the hours of daylight are quite limited in late November. But the upside was that I was still out exploring when the sun set in beautiful fashion, washing the sky with every shade of purple and pink.

Michele from Legging It

When it came time for us to leave Spain in 2014, we had a couple of options. The deciding factor for our route was that I had read about Jeff Coon’s amazing Flower Puppy and became determined to see it. We were on a motorcycle so I plotted our journey to include Bilbao. Ignoring the fact that it added an extra 200 km to our trip and a more expensive ferry to the UK, I was undeterred. We arrived in town and found our way to the Guggenheim Museum, and parked the bike around the corner. My excitement faded to being stunned as I was confronted with a huge mass of scaffolding and plastic. It turns out they replant the puppy a couple of times a year with seasonal flowers and our visit coincided with this. The closest I was going to get to seeing it was an image, the same as all of the hundreds on the internet. I hope to return one day to see it but now living back in Australia it seems a dream.

Keri from Our Globetrotters

When my in-laws decided to take their first big overseas trip to see their first grandchild in London, we really wanted to spoil them. We were showing off how easy we could take a break to another country, so planned a long weekend in Paris. Securing a great last minute hotel and Eurostar package to Paris, we were off! We completely wowed them with the city’s famous sights, our amazing location next to Champs Elysees and quality family time – I was winning top daughter-in-law points here!

The final day we split forces to kill a few hours. I told them the train left at five something but neglected to actually check the tickets and left them in my suitcase at the hotel. Desperately trying to fill a final few rain soaked hours we met back at our hotel at 3pm… only to discover our train left in 20 minutes – 15.20.  It has a 5 in it….

Of course, Eurostar tickets bought in a package are non-refundable, non-transferable. It was a busy Sunday evening. They had a plane to catch back to Australia the following day. Four new business premier class standby tickets later that cost significantly more than the entire weekend, we made it.

We have taken literally hundreds of planes, trains, and ferries in our lives. I worked in finance, and am meticulous with numbers, schedules, and meetings. But you can be sure that one costly, tiny little mistake 7 years ago has not been forgotten.

Margherita from The Crowded Planet

I once booked a hotel in Lagos in Nigeria thinking it was Lagos in the south of Portugal. I’m not quite sure how this happened; I’ve spent a lot of time living in Portugal, and even in Lagos itself. At the time I did think that I didn’t recognize that hotel, but thought nothing of it until I saw the confirmation e-mail.

The booking was non-refundable, and so I immediately began looking for a cheap flight to Nigeria. It would make this mistake even more expensive, but in my panicked state, I thought that maybe I could somehow break even by taking a trip to Nigeria.

In the end, I phoned the hotel booking website and they actually gave me a refund. Now whenever I book a hotel, I always double-check the country just to be safe.

I had been living in Bangkok for 2 years and I was taking a flight to Taiwan to meet a friend over there. I feel because I travel a lot I can be very casual with timing and packing and not being as organized as I appear to be. I left my apartment and took the skytrain to BKK airport. It was only when I was on the skytrain that I suddenly realized that my flight left in an hour… and I wasn’t even at the airport yet! I wasn’t unable to check in online because the airline website wasn’t working and I arrived at the airport with 40 minutes to spare. For domestic flights I might have gotten away with it. Unfortunately, the check-in desk wasn’t having any of it, despite my protestations, insistence that I only had hand luggage, and eventual tears – none of which swayed this woman to check me in and let me go through security. She also told me that the next flight to Taipei was full. I’m aware that a lot of lying can happen so when I check on skyscanner lo and behold there were seats available on the next flight. When the check-in desk switched staff members I explained to the next woman what happened. She was absolutely lovely, booked me onto the next flight, and didn’t even charge me! All things turned out ok in the end. I was only a few hours late to meet my mate and we had an incredible week of surfing, hiking, and dolphin spotting around Taiwan!

After getting very good at Call of Duty over the next few days, I finally got it delivered to me by the airline and I could go into Samoa legally. It was not what I planned for at all.

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