JohnM62

Boarding a flight to Jersey at A15, I was at the gate, had just had my boarding card checked and was walking towards the jetway when someone waiting at the adjacent gate asked me in accented but fluent English if I was going to Jersey and I confirmed I was. 'Newark in Jersey?' he asked, 'no Jersey channel Islands'. 'New Jersey?' he persisted, 'no just Jersey'. 'Jersey USA?' 'No, just jersey, Old Jersey'. I would have held the queue up if I'd explained any further not that I could make it any clearer whatever I said.

If he'd been heading for Newark I could understand him being concerned he was at the wrong gate. But he was at an A gate himself, so why would he care? He wasn't making conversation out of curiosity he was talking as though he needed to know and anyway I was was walking past him not just standing about. Some kind of intentional distraction? but from what?

mmogdan

Perhaps they booked to Jersey, CI instead of New Jersey by mistake ?

Budapest instead of Bucharest, anyone ?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/t...t-booking.html

DeathSlam

There but for the grace of God. San Jose, Manchester and others...

JohnM62

From where they were standing I took them to be waiting for whichever flight went from A16, but it's a thought.

Genius1

I suspect he was travelling to EWR, but had followed the gate number for your flight to JER.

corporate-wage-slave

I've told this anecdote before, but I was once on an airside bus from T5 to T3 and I noticed the person near me had a boarding pass for a domestic flight from gate 3. I managed to get Special Services to ferry them to the right place.

golfmad

Many years ago, I was on the North - South transit in LGW and a lady asked me whether we were on the train to Brighton. It wasn't clear how long she had been going between North and South but we managed to get her to the railway station.

VSLover

kind of funny/unfortunate for anyone caught up confusing JER with NJ...and from the looks of it BA do have a 1540 to JER and a 1630 to EWR.

DeathSlam

I get confused a lot, especially when I have to spend an extended amount of time in T3.
Airports are just a massive stress situation anyway for most people, so you can't be surprised by people occassionally going to the wrong continent or indeed sitting in the wrong (my) seat. Airport staff have seen every one of these mess ups before multiple times and will do the best they can to sort it no matter how lame brained you have been. Like I said, there but for...

Can I help you

Bet he bought a cheap fare and made booked the wrong destination.

Robert279

I recall that when Ryanair launched its new service to Chile (!), with promotional fares at a bargain £1.99, passengers were surprised to find themselves in Spain, at a very different Santiago

TheOldMan

Wasn't there a chap who thought he had booked to go to Sydney Australia and ended up in Sydney in Canada ?

abligh

A long while ago (this was I think the days of paper tickets) I booked (or so I had thought) SFO->PDX; PDX->JFK->LHR. However, the agent (VS I think) had booked SFO->PDX; PWM->JFK->LHR (that's Portland Maine, not Portland Oregon). I turned up at PDX and found the airline I'd been booked on didn't even fly from the airport. They acknowledged it was their fault but I needed to pay the fare difference (I should have pushed on that one I think, but I've learnt a lot in 20+ years), and I ended up on a later TATL back.

JTXC

That has happened more than once.

DeathSlam

I nearly did this Santiago error myself!
The only proper mess up I've done like this was booking a hotel on the east coast of the US in the wrong town with the same name. (In my defense they were only about 50km from each other)
When I got to the hotel and we figured out what had happened they were so used to it that my reservation was changed in a few seconds.