{"id":17788,"date":"2026-08-07T13:31:46","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T11:31:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.navratil.travel\/when-a-person-flies-to-the-right-place-just-on-another-continent\/"},"modified":"2026-09-03T20:39:55","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T18:39:55","slug":"when-a-person-flies-to-the-right-place-just-on-another-continent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.navratil.travel\/en\/when-a-person-flies-to-the-right-place-just-on-another-continent\/","title":{"rendered":"When a person flies to the right place, just on another continent."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When traveling, there is a strange moment when a person is convinced they have everything under control. The flight is booked, the hotel reserved, the luggage packed, the passport in their pocket. At the airport, they pass through security, find the correct gate, board the plane, and settle in comfortably. At that point, there is practically no reason to doubt that in a few hours they will disembark exactly where they planned. And yet, it can still happen that they end up on an entirely different continent. <\/p>\n\n

This is exactly what happened in 2017 to an eighteen-year-old Dutchman, Milan Schipper. He wanted to visit Australia and, while searching for flights to Sydney, came across an offer that seemed suspiciously good. The round-trip ticket was supposed to cost him about 800 euros, which for a young traveler looked like a once-in-a-lifetime deal. He was flying from Amsterdam to Toronto, and from there he was meant to continue to Sydney. The first doubts arose only in Canada. He looked at the aircraft waiting at the gate and something did not seem right. It was small. Very small. Uncomfortably small for a flight across half the planet to Australia. <\/p>\n\n

He thought it would probably be an interesting flight. And it certainly was interesting, because he was not flying to Australia at all. The Sydney listed on Milan\u2019s ticket was not the famous Australian city with the Opera House and Bondi Beach, but the much smaller Sydney in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. It began to dawn on him definitively during the flight when he tracked the aircraft\u2019s route and, instead of heading toward Australia, it calmly turned toward eastern Canada. When he landed, instead of an Australian summer he was greeted by a Canadian winter. And since he was traveling to Australia, his clothing matched that expectation: a T-shirt, sweatpants, and a thin jacket. Outside, however, lay snow, and a snowstorm was approaching. His big Australian vacation thus ended before it even began. At the airport, staff helped him get back to Toronto and from there home to the Netherlands. Perhaps the most amusing part of the whole story is that Milan was not the first person to pull off something similar. Sydney in Nova Scotia had already welcomed passengers who had originally planned a far more exotic trip to Australia. So if you ever find an unbelievably cheap flight to Sydney, you may not have just discovered a loophole in the airline\u2019s pricing system. You may simply be flying to Canada. <\/p>\n\n

And Sydney is far from the only geographical trap. A very similar story involves San Jos\u00e9. Two American friends planned a vacation in Costa Rica, had their accommodation booked, were looking forward to tropical weather, and everything seemed completely normal. They boarded their flight and flew to San Jos\u00e9. The only problem was that San Jos\u00e9 is also located in California. And that is exactly where they landed. One can imagine that strange moment after stepping off the plane, expecting Central America and getting Silicon Valley instead. Their dream Costa Rica remained thousands of kilometers away. The friends, however, reacted about as well as anyone could in such a situation: since they were already in California, they decided to make use of the unplanned stopover and then continue on to the San Jos\u00e9 they had originally intended to visit. Even better, this trap works in the opposite direction as well. California\u2019s San Jos\u00e9 uses the airport code SJC, while the main international airport near San Jos\u00e9 in Costa Rica has the code SJO. A difference of a single letter. And that one letter has already sent travelers to Costa Rica instead of California. In such a case, a person quickly learns why three-letter airport codes exist, and at the same time why it would be wise to read them before paying for a flight. <\/p>\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n

Sometimes, however, you do not even need two cities with the same name. A little inattention during booking is enough. British traveler Richella Heekin wanted to surprise her boyfriend for his thirtieth birthday. She planned a big trip to Las Vegas, booked a hotel, and bought the flight tickets. The whole adventure cost her about 1,200 pounds. On the day of departure, they arrived at Birmingham Airport and were probably already picturing casinos, the Strip, and the neon lights of Las Vegas in their minds. But their plane was not there. When they checked their reservation, a rather crucial detail emerged. The ticket was indeed from Birmingham to Las Vegas, but not from Birmingham in England. It departed from Birmingham in Alabama, USA. The British Birmingham uses the code BHX, the American one BHM. Three letters that most people do not really notice when booking a flight decided that instead of a big American trip, they would stay home. They did not make it to Las Vegas and ended up saving the birthday trip with a much closer destination: Amsterdam. <\/p>\n\n

And then there are geographical pairs where it takes overlooking just a few letters. Ni\u0161 and Nice are a perfect Balkan\u2013French example. One is a city in southern Serbia, the other a symbol of the French Riviera. In a quick glance at a booking portal, however, the difference between NIS and NCE can seem much smaller than the difference between what you packed in your suitcase and what you will actually need upon arrival. Imagine you are looking forward to a promenade by the Mediterranean, beaches on the C\u00f4te d\u2019Azur, and dinner somewhere by the harbor in Nice. The plane lands, you open your map app, and instead of the French Riviera, you find yourself in southern Serbia. No sea anywhere, no Monaco, and certainly no Saint-Tropez. On the other hand, the burek is excellent, and rakija can explain away many travel disappointments far better than a customer support agent. <\/p>\n\n

When hearing stories like these, people first laugh and tell themselves, \u201cThis could never happen to me.\u201d After all, they know where they are traveling. They know geography, they check their tickets, and they know that Sydney is in Australia. But that is precisely the charm of such mistakes. Most of these people were not foolish, and many were not even completely inexperienced. They simply made a small error in a situation where the brain automatically sees what it expects. When you are looking for Sydney, you find Sydney. When you want to fly from Birmingham, you see Birmingham on the screen. When you are heading to San Jos\u00e9, the booking system offers you San Jos\u00e9, and few people at that moment pause to consider whether, by chance, there might be another one on the opposite side of the continent or the planet. Perhaps this is why it is good to keep a little humility when traveling. You may have hundreds of flights behind you, have visited dozens of countries, know airports better than your own bus station, and move through terminals with the expression of someone who can no longer be surprised. And then one day you overlook a single letter. Such things can happen to anyone in the world, whether to someone flying for the first time in their life or to a traveler who has already flown around the planet several times. Experience may reduce the number of mistakes, but it never makes us infallible travelers. And perhaps that is a good thing. Because the best travel stories often do not arise when everything goes exactly according to plan. They arise when you expect to disembark in Australia, and instead you open the airplane door in snowy Canada.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When traveling, there is a strange moment when a person is convinced they have everything under control. The flight is booked, the hotel reserved, the luggage packed, the passport in their pocket. At the airport, they pass through security, find the correct gate, board the plane, and settle in comfortably. At that point, there is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":13112,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[330],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.navratil.travel\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.navratil.travel\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.navratil.travel\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.navratil.travel\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.navratil.travel\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17788"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.navratil.travel\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17789,"href":"https:\/\/www.navratil.travel\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17788\/revisions\/17789"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.navratil.travel\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.navratil.travel\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.navratil.travel\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.navratil.travel\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}