The “2009 dumbest moments in travel” – from the Travel Insights 100

by Scott Carmichael on

Travel Insights 100 2009 Dumb Travel Moments

In 2009, the travel industry provided us with plenty to complain about. From new fees to late night TSA subpoenas to bloggers, there never seems to be a limit to the dumb things they manage to come up with. The Travel Insights 100 asked its members to submit their own favorite dumb travel moment.

Several Gadling bloggers are part of the group of 100, and my own dumbest moment is included in the presentation. I picked fees, and the way fees are introduced. Fees beat out anything else the airlines did in my opinion, because it is the one thing that is going to keep annoying us for years to come.

Fees also annoy me because of their copycat status. For some reason, when one airline adds a new fee, others seem to follow within hours. Dumbest fee’s of 2009? The “peak travel” surcharge added to tickets on holidays, and the British Airways seat selection fee.

Worst travel mistakes of the 2000s: Eating the grapes

by Catherine Bodry on

We all have food poisoning stories from the road, I’m sure. I have a new one every week here in China. But was there ever a time when you willingly, knowingly, ate something that was bound to make you sick? So sick that you end up delirious in Panjim, India, trying to hitchhike to the hospital at three in the morning? So sick that your hotel owner and random new travel buddy have to arrange transport to said hospital, which has flickering lights and bloody cotton balls lying around?

It was because of the grapes.

A month earlier, just after I arrived in Delhi, I saw a man pushing a large handcart full of wet, dirty grapes. They glistened in the morning sunlight, and looked absolutely like something that would make you sick. I clearly recall turning to my friend Jen and saying, “Do not let me eat grapes while in India.”

Flash forward a month later. I’m by myself in Gokarna, a beach town south of Goa. There’s a nice hike to some isolated beaches, and I set out alone. On the way, I meet a nice middle-aged Indian man. We leap-frog each other several times over the course of the hike, and make casual conversation. After spending a couple of hours on the beach, I run into him again on the hike back. He is sitting beneath a tree, eating grapes. I am hot and tired and hungry, and he has been very friendly in a non-menacing way throughout my afternoon. He offers me grapes, and out of politeness I don’t feel I can refuse. The scene changes to slow motion as he hands a small bunch to me, and I pop them in my mouth, one bacteria-ridden bite at a time.Fast-forward again, this time about 10 hours. I am writhing around in my bed, sweating. I recall getting up at one point and walking around town, shouting up to a bunch of guys playing cards in an upstairs apartment. I tell them I need a ride to the hospital. They appear concerned but aren’t keen to prop me up on the back of one of their motorbikes. I wander back to my hotel and wake up a Canadian girl I’ve only just met. She wakes up the hotel owner, who helps her coordinate a ride to the hospital. Once there, they test me for malaria but ultimately announce that I have a simple case of food poisoning. I am sent home with a packet of antibiotics and some re-hydrating drink mix.

The ride home involved some hitchhiking on the part of my wonderful companion, who refused to ride a motorbike. I woke up the next morning feeling much better.

But still. It was dangerous and stupid to eat the grapes. Just as a month earlier it was stupid to drink chai from a hovel where a woman wiped the glasses clean with her soaking, dirty sari.

Worst travel mistakes of the 2000’s: Kuala Lumpur passport shenanigans

by Grant Martin on

Back before my days as a Gadling blogger I used to travel on an extremely tight margin. As a starving college graduate, travel was my main priority — debt, work and rent, well, those were ancillary.

My usual modus operandi involved saving up a few hundred dollars in cash and clearing another few hundred on my credit card prior to departure. I could spend and accrue debt in parallel until I returned home. And if I engineered things right, I would be hitting zero dollars and maximum debt by the time I touched down at home.

The success of the above plan was obviously predicated on my travel going flawlessly — no outrageous expenses, disasters or errors on my part. And for the first 99% of my trip through Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Hong Kong, everything worked like a well oiled machine. Until I left for my homeward bound flight from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok to Hong Kong to Los Angeles to Dallas to Detroit.

The night prior I had spent my last dollars short of train fare on a couple of delicious Tiger Beers on the streets of KL, the hotel expenses already covered and my last meal consumed. We had opted to stay in a nicer hotel than usual for our last night on the road, a $20 cell with two lonely single beds and dank, flowing curtains. It was a setup so trustworthy that I hid my passport under the mattress and kept my other valuables clutched in my front pocket.

Waking up at 6:30 for my 8:30 Air Asia flight to Bangkok I groggily collected my belongings and shuffled towards the door, my last ringgit going towards an express train ticket to KLIA nonstop.

Few feelings on the planet beat the dread of realizing that you’ve lost your passport. I can only compare it to swallowing a baseball-sized rock or perhaps getting punched in the stomach — the feeling of “Oh no. Something is terribly, terribly wrong,” and a deep, sullen weight inside of your stomach. Reaching the airport I checked to find that I would indeed miss my flight without my passport, but that there was another, later flight with which I could connect. But I had to hurry and get back to that hotel before they cleaned the room.As it turns out, those ringgit that I spent the night prior were indeed my last. Dipping my ATM card into the train station kiosk, the LCD blinked “declined” back at me, slowly, scoldingly. Trying my credit card yielded the same result. I was out of money — completely — in Kuala Lumpur Airport without a passport.

Herein lies the worst feeling that I have ever had in my years travel. No money, no phone, no safety net and no passport in a foreign country. I did two laps around the departure terminal staring at the ceiling and getting my shit together — then put my backpack down and rifled through the gadget pocket. Twenty dollars. I had stashed a twenty in there when I left the states in case of emergency. It was still there.

Back at the hotel my companion had already left and the room had been turned down — the front desk didn’t understand why I needed to get back into the room so urgently. But when they followed me into the room and saw me pick up the mattress they knew why: my passport was still flattened between the slabs. I would make it home, barely, with the last $20 to my name through five different airports, twelve time zones and a lifetime of stress.

As it turns out I wasn’t out of money, there was a problem with all international bank transactions that morning and nothing was making it through. But the lesson of a young, foolish traveler is still seared into my memory: have a backup plan. Have several. You’re not that far from totally cutting loose and falling off the map.

Worst travel mistakes of the 2000’s: Diplomatic Dipsticks

by Andrew Evans on


As we take time to count our travel sins of the past decade, I get all teary-eyed and indecisive. Where to begin? Couldn’t we just say “Iraq” and be done with it? And are we including food mistakes? ‘Cuz I got some real doozies: how about shrimp ceviche from a quaint Mexican beach cafe or fresh cut watermelon in India? Uh, those would be travel mistakes, no? But like, since we’re trying to refrain from the scatological (are we?), I choose to relate the following story of which I may or may not have played a small cameo role:

Once upon a time, there were two young men working in Brussels, preparing to embark on a business trip to poor, struggling, deprived Eastern Europe. Filled with kindness and goodwill, the two decided they would add a charitable purpose to their journey by driving across Europe in their vehicle–a beige, 1975 Mercedes with a good 250,000 km under her belt–and filling it with used office computers to give away to the lesser half of the digital divide.

in order to ease their way through the red tape of certain notorious Eastern European countries, the boss of the young men lent them a pair of expired diplomatic license plates, which (in Euro-capital Brussels) tends to grant you permission to do whatever you want: park on the sidewalk, speed a little bit, drive like a maniac, etc. So, the young men screwed on the two red license plates and set off on their grand cross-European adventure.

Feeling confident with their special diplomatic status, the young men parked in the city center of lovely Budapest for a break. They wandered about for hours sightseeing and upon returning, discovered not one, but TWO parking tickets fluttering from the car’s windshield wiper. As they wrung their hands with worry for this small misfortune, a Hungarian policeman approached them, pointing out the fresh car ticket and asking for additional information. Immediately after that, a second Hungarian policeman approached from the rear, pointing to the second parking ticket.The young men stood back and watched with awe as the two Hungarian policemen began to argue with each other. Both policeman had issued parking tickets, both wanted glory for punishing the foreign offenders and yet, upon closer look, they had in fact issued tickets to two different cars. The pair of diplomatic license plates were actually different number plates gleaned from different cars, and each cop had recorded only one of the numbers on the ticket. It was also soon revealed that both were expired plates. The young men could not respond to the policemen’s inquiry as to the actual registration number for their car. This led to the car getting towed to the outskirts of Budapest and a thorough search being conducted during which time, a dozen computers were found stashed in the backseat and trunk of the car.

To make a long story short, it was something of an international incident that required some top-level EU intervention to resolve. Anyone who traveled in Central and Eastern Europe in the early 2000s will remember the huge stolen car rackets that pervaded and made it nigh impossible to rent a car. After this little glitch, it was a miracle that the car was eventually released back to the young men and they were able to drive back to Brussels.

And so the moral of the story is: When in Budapest, make sure your back matches your front. Always.

Worst travel mistakes of the 2000’s : Locked in the lounge

by Scott Carmichael on

As we look back at the past ten years, and prepare ourselves for the next ten, lets take a moment to remember the dumbest mistake we ever made when traveling. For the coming week, we’ll entertain you with embarrassing stories of our dumbest travel mistakes, all for the sole purpose of your entertainment.

For me, the dumbest thing I did in the past ten years was fall asleep in the airport arrivals lounge.

It all happened when I arrived at Heathrow after a quick trip to New York. As I had a 4 hour layover, I decided to go landside for a full (free) English breakfast in the lounge followed by a quick shower. I then took “a short nap” in the serenity room.

This room was probably one of the quietest and most comfortable in the airport, because I was awoken by a security guard 17 hours later. This also happened to be a full 9 hours after the lounge had closed for the day. I either set off the alarm, or he was on his rounds checking for stupid people who fall asleep in the lounge.

A British Airways representative met me and apologized profusely for failing to notice I was still in the lounge. The airline then took care of rebooking me for a flight to Amsterdam the next morning, and provided a room at the airport Sheraton.

This is by no means the only stupid thing I’ve done during my many years of traveling, but it is the one that has stuck with the most – and the one that always brings back fond memories of the almost 325 trips I took passing through Heathrow Airport.

Tomorrow we’ll bring you another story of a dumb travel mistake, and later this week you’ll have the chance to tell us your own favorite – with a chance at winning a fantastic prize!