Ticketing Horrors
Modernity, convenience, getting things done from the comfort of your home sweet home, all these big words inexplicably also bring along a rich serving of foolhardiness. The “do-it yourself” models seldom ask you to recheck on the correctness of what you have done and in some cases even hurry you through the error. These tools delivered to us by the power of the internet are useful only when we are careful enough to use them with precision. Against “date of journey”, if you key in 12th January instead of 12th February, there is no tool to read your mind and make the correction necessary. The tickets are printed and you reach the airport on 12th February only to realize that you have missed your flight a month ago, and cannot travel on 12th February.
You would have meticulously worked out a cruise vacation, with a Caribbean cruise, cheap airline tickets, hotel accommodation, car rentals – everything in place. But, alas, only the date went wrong. Common ticketing errors do not limit themselves to the date alone. Look at some of these:
Check your tickets thoroughly
For international travelers, it is imperative that their name be spelt perfectly in the flight tickets and matches like a mirror with the passport and visa documents. Minor errors too have the potential to cause you major embarrassments. Another secret about this name business is – the security personnel can be fussy about the name for two diverse reasons – reason one – security and reason two – greed. In some of the most modern airports, you would be charged a cool $100.00 as change fee for a name mismatch or even asked to buy a new plane ticket. Imagine if this happens to your cheap airline tickets – all your effort in sourcing that could become counterproductive.
Code share
Code share is a little demon employed by the airline industry generally to switch to a lower standard of service on a connecting flight when you are on long haul routes. At the point of booking your tickets, if you do adequate research to understand the characteristics of this demon, you can keep the creature at bay. This should be done on all tickets including cheap airline tickets.
