Tag: Travel Hell

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How an Incorrect Airport Code Sent Travelers 7,000 Miles in the Wrong Direction

May 20, 2013 at 8:48 AM | by | Comments (0)

We’ve joked before about heading to Toledo instead of Tahiti, but apparently a similar travel snafu just happened to a couple who ended up far from their true destination.

The original plan had the couple leaving from Los Angeles with plans to check out Dakar over in Senegal. However, a little bit of an error had them headed elsewhere. Their Turkish Airlines tickets were supposed to send them to DKR—that’s Dakar—but thanks to a little bit of a spelling error they were headed to DAC—that’s the Dhaka region and Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport way over in Bangladesh.

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One Very Easy, Borderline Insane Way to Get Kicked Off a Flight

May 14, 2013 at 11:15 AM | by | Comments (0)

There's a distinct difference between "fan" and "stan." A fan has a normal affection for a product, person, or somesuch. A stan? Well, they're different. They fall into the batshit category. They go too far. They can be dangerous.

That's how American Airlines crew could categorize the passenger they had to remove from a recent flight from LA to JFK.

A woman, obviously Whitney Houston's biggest fan, repeatedly sang her "I Will Always Love You" song for hours on end, before passengers had had enough.

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A Friendly Reminder to Double, Triple Check Your Travel Documents

April 17, 2013 at 11:56 AM | by | Comments (0)

Sounds kind of like a given to ensure your travel documents are in order before handing over your boarding pass, but take it from us that you should always have another look on that tourist visa or itinerary. It's easy to overlook little misspellings or transcribed numbers, so it is even more important to have someone else look it over to give it the thumbs up.

Here is our story; any American traveler wanting to enter Vietnam needs to obtain a visa. This is not an e-visa that can be purchased online and electronically attached to your passport number. This is one of those old-fashioned, visit-a-consulate or mail-away-your-passport to the nearest embassy situations. While it's a bit of a hassle, a side perk is that you do get a pretty colorful sticker in your passport to show all your friends.

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Thank You, Science: In-Flight Farts are Totally Fine

February 20, 2013 at 10:39 AM | by | Comments (0)

We always try to rise above and be mature adults, but sometimes we just can’t avoid reverting to our 12-year old mindset—especially when it comes to fart jokes. Usually bathroom humor isn’t something that makes its way into the travel news, but apparently scientists have been hard at work studying airplane flatulence while we’ve been writing about stuff like in-flight WiFi and airplane paint jobs. Now that the research has been completed and the data has been analyzed, it looks like letting one rip at 35,000-feet is actually encouraged—at least according to science.

Thanks to the scholarly journalists over at the New York Daily News, we learned about the findings arriving out of New Zealand. It sounds like the air pressure up in the air causes all kinds of side effects including an increase in gas; however, trying to maintain one’s best behavior keeps that gas inside most passengers. In an article entitled Flatulence on airplanes: just let it go scientists think that we should just let our bodily functions prevail, and they’re actually—at least somewhat—encouraging passengers and pilots to participate in mile-high farts.

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It May Be a Floating Toxic Mess, but the 'Carnival Triumph' is Still Booking Cruises

February 18, 2013 at 4:06 PM | by | Comments (0)

So after what we can only imagine as a truly horrible, disgusting, and miserable week, the Carnival ship Triumph is back in port. In case you missed it, the ship was busy doing its thing with passengers partying down, but then there was an engine fire which stopped the necessary bits from working. Long story short the bathrooms failed, food was limited, and the boat floated off from its planned course.

Now that it's been towed back to Mobile, Alabama there’s plenty of work to get the ship up and running—and clean—but it looks like they’re ready to start booking some new cruises.

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Carnival Triumph 'Nightmare' Not Really Impacting Cruise Sales

February 15, 2013 at 4:21 PM | by | Comments (0)

When future scholars write the definitive catalog of early 21st century First World Problems, the hysteria over the Carnival Cruises Triumph debacle will surely rank near the top. At last count there were well over a thousand different articles on Google News describing the experience as a "nightmare" for the passengers. This one has a picture of a woman kissing the ground once she got off the ship, as if she had just been released from a Soviet gulag or something.

Really? A "nightmare"? Is that what we're calling it when you have to spend a few extra days on a modern ocean liner the likes of which previous generations could barely imagine? There are millions of children in this world laboring under body-killing, brain-numbing, poverty-stricken misery. We understand that the cruise ship got a little bit icky toward the end, but broken toilets or not the passengers were on a fucking cruise ship. We watched news reports of the ship being towed into port. There were people dancing on deck of the fucking cruise ship they were on.

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Carnival Passengers Finally Reach Shore; Will Probably Never Take a Cruise Again

February 15, 2013 at 10:32 AM | by | Comment (1)

The real-life horror story of the 3,470 passengers and 1,086 crew members of Carnival Triumph Cruise which was stranded for five days in the Gulf of Mexico after the ship lost power has finally come to an end.

Last night, the broken boat arrived in Mobile, Alabama after being pulled along, slowly, by tugboats. It took another five hours for passengers to wait before they could actually step off the filthy ship which reportedly had overflowing toilets, broken AC units, food shortages and other undesirable living conditions. Folks had taken to erecting tents on the upper decks just to get away from the foul odors. One passenger told a news outlet:

"The thing I'm looking forward to most is having a working toilet and not having to breathe in the smell of fecal matter."

Ooo, perhaps a new tag line for the next Carnival Cruise ad?

Carnival has said they will refund all passengers' trip expenses as well as offer them a free trip on another Carnival Cruise of their choice and now they've just offered an additional $500 per person. But we're not sure that will take away the awful associations these beleaguered passengers now have with cruises.

Tell us: Would you still take a cruise after having been through a nightmare like this? Would you still take a cruise knowing that something like this could happen? We wanna know! Tell us in comments below!

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What It's Like to Be Stuck Onboard a Crippled Cruise Ship

Where: Mexico
February 12, 2013 at 10:31 AM | by | Comments (0)

Yikes. If you haven't already heard, there's a Carnival Cruise ship drifting without electricity (and, thus, propulsion) in the Caribbean. It's the Carnival Triumph, a megaship which embarked on a 4-night cruise from Galveston, Texas over the weekend, only to be crippled by an engine room fire on Sunday. Not much was known about the state of the ship and onboard conditions for the passengers until several were able to place phone calls when a sister Carnival ship came to the Triumph's aid with backup food and water.

The ship is being pushed by two tugboats from her position off the coast of Mexico and she should reach Mobile, Alabama on Thursday.

Still, this is one more entry into our series of "The Evolution of Cruise Ships," as events like this do happen as much as you pray they won't on your cruise. In fact, one of our friends suffered a similar fate on her cruise, though it took place before the age of cellphones/internet/immediate news dissemination.

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One Stuck Traveler is Living Like Tom Hanks in 'The Terminal'

Where: Chile
February 11, 2013 at 9:11 AM | by | Comments (0)

We feel like this isn’t the first—and probably isn’t the last—time something like this will go down at the airport, but once again we’re looking at a real life story straight out of the Tom Hanks movie The Terminal. It doesn’t sound like there was a cute flight attendant in this example, as apparently Catherine Zeta-Jones was too busy to reprise her role in the real life sorry. Anyway, the latest airport sleepover all took place over the last few months at Santiago Airport in Chile.

It’s been a couple of months since Rodrigo Ben-Azul first arrived at the airport, and it’s all because he can’t get back to Spain. There’s no political conflict back home like in the movie, but his problem is way simpler. He’s run out of money and he’s flat broke. Apparently he’s waiting for family back in Spain to wire some euros his way, but until then he’s been collecting the luggage trolleys hoping to earn a few cents here and there.

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The Obligatory 'If You're Traveling This Weekend, Don't' Blizzard Warning

February 8, 2013 at 3:47 PM | by | Comments (0)

Good God in heaven. It's getting worse. 2,792 cancellation this morning have become 4,500 flights canceled since Thursday, with numbers still "likely to grow." As we told you this morning, the New York airports are pretty much shut down, and have now reached more than 1,800 total flights canceled today and another 640 shut down for tomorrow. In Boston Nemo is scoring a perfect 10/10 on the Weather Channel's Winter Impact Index. If you were thinking of traveling to New England in the near future, make other plans.

Also be ready to make other plans if you're traveling to any airports with airlines that have New England hubs. It's not just people trying to get to and from the East Coast any more. It's anyone who was going to pass through, or anyone who needed a plane that's currently there. Houston's already had 100 preemptive cancellations and Miami's up to 90. A "ripple effect," is how we believe the airline industry refers to it. Flightaware's cancellation page is where you want to go to see if you've been personally screwed by Nemo, or whether it's just everyone else in the country.

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Lost Luggage? Ask Nicely for a Toiletry Kit

Where: Spain
January 22, 2013 at 9:44 AM | by | Comment (1)

Luggage gets lost. Sometimes even our luggage gets lost. Most of the time it's no big deal since we planned accordingly and packed the essentials in a carry on and have what we need until the airline get their act together and delivers the bag. No big deal, right? Not all the time. In particular the time we put all our money on one color and let it roll on Iberia from Madrid to Mallorca.

It was a normal one-way flight to the Balearic Island. After what seemed like an uneventful check-in and after closer inspection we were given the wrong boarding passes. Inquiring about the confusion, collecting correct passes and a confirmation that the luggage will be loaded, we headed off to the lounge. In a surprise twist, our luggage was not on the belt in Palma.

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So, Which Airline Supposedly Has the Rudest Crew?

January 2, 2013 at 12:30 PM | by | Comments (3)


These ladies don't look rude

Coming off a few days of our own little annual awards, this story might seem like it's part of The Jauntys, but it's most definitely not. In fact, this dubious accolade is nothing any airline would like to display on a shelf in their HQ. Instead, the award for the Rudest Flight Atttendant would make any airline exec sit upright in their seat and pay attention.

Skyscanner, a flight search engine, recently polled their customers on which airline they believed employed the least friendly cabin crew. Before we get to the answer, we need to detail the (very) unscientific survey. The survey group consisted of 1,000 website customers being asked questions about US carriers only.

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