Sometimes It’s Not the Airline’s Fault. It’s Yours.

I shelled out that money at Paris Orly Airport after I made an embarrassing but common mistake. I booked the wrong date for a nonrefundable flight to Portugal and didn’t find out until I tried to check in with TAP Air Portugal at the airport.

TAP had no other available seats that early April day. The next day was iffy and would still require me to pay the fare difference. So I bought a $400 one-way flight on Iberia Airlines and ate the other ticket, which cost $150. It was an expensive lesson on being careful when you book travel. I’d bought the flight on my phone in a rush and the date I put in was a week later than intended.

Travel is expensive enough these days without adding in the cost of your mistakes. But they happen all the time, even to the platinum travelers among us.

Reddit and other social-media sites are loaded with confessions from people who booked the wrong date, wrong direction or even wrong city with the right name. (Was your destination Rochester, N.Y., or Rochester, Minn.?) A member of Girls Love Travel, a Facebook group with nearly 1.4 million members, posed a question about travel mistakes recently. It drew more than 1,200 comments. Unforced errors included packing a big new bottle of perfume in a carry-on bag and missing a flight after the announced delay evaporated.

Major airlines have taken the sting out of some mistakes with the elimination of ticket-change fees, and Transportation Department rules usually require airlines to offer refunds within 24 hours of booking. Those aren’t much help if you realize your mistake late. Hotels and car-rental companies generally have more flexible change policies unless it’s a prepaid reservation, which often offers the cheapest rates.

One car, two airports

Kansas special-education teacher Diane Blake isn’t her family’s travel planner: Her Type-A husband handles that, she says. But he bowed out of a trip to Disney World with their daughters a few years ago, so Mrs. Blake booked the Allegiant flight to Orlando, Fla., and reserved a rental car.

She didn’t realize until she landed at Orlando Sanford International Airport that her car awaited them at Orlando International Airport, 30 miles away. The budget car-rental company she booked didn’t operate at the smaller airport. Mrs. Blake says a woman at the rental counter had “zero empathy left," because passengers routinely make the same mistake.

She and her daughters Ubered between the airports to pick up and return the car. “I was trying to save money but my mistake cost us hours and $120," she says.

Scott Keyes, founder of the travel site Going, formerly Scott’s Cheap Flights, says travelers have also been known to book the wrong airport for flights, sometimes with comical results. One of his favorites: booking a ticket to Sydney, Nova Scotia, instead of Sydney, Australia.

“They get on this small regional jet and they’re a little bit confused about how this thing is going to get across the Pacific," he says.

International missteps

Passport problems trip up plenty of travelers. They realize too late that their passport expired or will expire within the next six months, which might preclude entry to some countries.

Caitlyn Buchholz, a radiologic technologist in St. Louis, and her husband nearly missed their honeymoon in Jamaica due to a whopper of a passport issue.

Two days after their December 2020 wedding, they flew from Orlando to Jamaica. Mrs. Buchholz grabbed their passports from a safe before the trip and uploaded the information to her reservation, along with their Covid test results, then a major travel requirement. They scanned the passports at the airport and boarded without issue.

The trouble began seconds after she texted her family a photo of the sparkling Caribbean Sea she’d snapped during landing. A security official entered the plane looking for her husband. “You could tell this guy deals with trouble," she says.

The official quickly escorted them off the plane and into a room. They figured out the problem: Her husband had reported the passport lost a few years earlier and later found it, but stored that in the safe along with his replacement passport. It hadn’t expired, so it didn’t raise any alarm bells for them.

The couple was sent back to Orlando immediately. His mother overnighted the correct passport to their hotel. They stressed over whether it would arrive in time the next morning, but it did. They returned to Jamaica for what she calls the vacation of a lifetime.

Her advice: “If you ever claim your passport lost or stolen, or you’ve got a new one for whatever reason, you burn the existing one."

Anne Fuldby-Olsen, founder of Lincoln, Neb.-based tour company Women of the Midwest, routinely counsels clients to toss their old passports. So she was mortified when she pulled out an expired passport at the check-in counter at the Athens airport in late 2019.

“I grabbed the one with the [punched] holes in it," she says. “I don’t know how. It was just a nightmare."

She woke up her husband and asked him to meet her driver to hand off the correct one. He delivered it to the airport about 50 minutes before her flight to the U.S. She was flying business class; she doesn’t think she would have made the flight if she’d been in economy.

Mr. Keyes says travel fails can occasionally work in your favor. On a trip to Barcelona in 2016, he and his wife were distraught when the hotel they thought they’d booked near Las Ramblas, a popular boulevard, had no record of their reservation.

They had mistakenly booked a different location in the NH Hotel chain, a couple miles away in the Poblenou district, a lovely neighborhood that was less touristy.

“Sometimes, the unintended parts of travel end up being more memorable," he says.