The Detourist
Aussie Dave | Dec 31, 2006 | 1 comment
Talk about costly spelling errors.
A 21-year-old German tourist who wanted to visit his girlfriend in the Australian metropolis Sydney landed 13,000 kilometres away near Sidney, Montana, after mistyping his destination on a flight booking Web site.Dressed for the Australian summer in t-shirt and shorts, Tobi Gutt left Germany on Saturday for a four-week holiday.Instead of arriving “down under”, Gutt found himself on a different continent and bound for the chilly state of Montana.“I did wonder but I didn’t want to say anything,” Gutt told the Bild newspaper. “I thought to myself, you can fly to Australia via the United States.”Gutt’s airline ticket routed him via the U.S. city of Portland, Oregon, to Billings, Montana. Only as he was about to board a commuter flight to Sidney — an oil town of about 5,000 people — did he realise his mistake.The hapless tourist, who had only a thin jacket to keep out the winter cold, spent three days in Billings airport before he was able to buy a new ticket to Australia with 600 euros in cash that his parents and friends sent over from Germany.“I didn’t notice the mistake as my son is usually good with computers,” his mother, Sabine, told Reuters.
With the way this guy spells, it is lucky he wasn’t trying to get to Phuket.
About the Author
An Australian immigrant to Israel, Aussie Dave has been blogging since early 2003.Filed Under: General
That reminds me of two stories, although I don’t know if either of them is true.
There was an old man who thought he was on a flight from southern California to Oakland, a city near San Francisco. He was in the air several hours before he realized he was on his way to Auckland…New Zealand.
And then there was the French woman who wanted to see the brightly colored fall foliage in New England, in the USA. So she went to a travel agent in Paris to arrange a trip to New Hampshire. The travel agent misunderstood, and instead arranged a trip to…well, the woman found herself in Hampshire, England.