1. A Travel Horror Story in Morocco
Once I arrived in Turkey, I thought the nightmare would be over.
Until I realized I was a day early for my Visa.
To enter Turkey, you need a visitor’s Visa that you can buy online for $75. I had done this months earlier when I’d initially planned to arrive in Turkey. I’d even booked it a week early just in case!
It hadn’t even occurred to me to check the Visa when I’d rescheduled my trip. I was certain I’d be fine!
Unfortunately, they won’t let you into the country, even if you’re green at the gills and are clearly about to pass out in front of them.
…come to think of it, that may have been why they didn’t want to let me in the country.
Thankfully, they have kiosks at the airport to buy a new visa. They weren’t working, so I had to wait two hours for someone to fix one before I could swipe my credit card, get a new visa, and crawl into a cab to get to the hotel I wouldn’t leave for three days except to go to the hospital.
Moral of the travel horror story: check your Visas and don’t eat salad in Morocco.
19. The Booking Nightmare by The Fearless Foreigner
My year teaching and living in Russia was full of memorable moments. One of the most memorable actually took place when I was trying to get back to Russia from NYC during holiday break.
I was making the most of my last day in the Big Apple and wasn’t too concerned about the forecasted snowstorm. I headed to the airport as usual, taking public transportation.
The subway line had a detour and wasn’t running on its regular route. As a result I had to exit on a fairly deserted and snowy Brooklyn street hoping that a taxi would drive by.
I didn’t have a US phone plan and had no way of calling a taxi.
Just as I was going to give up, a taxi arrived and the driver seemed very surprised that my flight wasn’t canceled. I assured him it wasn’t.
We arrived at the airport late, but I was happily surprised to see no lines for security. I waited in the check in line for quite awhile before I realized we were waiting for hotel vouchers and not boarding passes.
Of course they ran out of vouchers and claimed every hotel in NYC was full. Unlikely story, but this was the real start of problems with Aeroflot Airlines.
As wifi wasn’t picking up in the airport for some reason and I had no cell data I was in quite a pickle. I hemmed and hawed about sleeping at the airport. I tried to buy a sim card from a vending machine. Luckily I knew the city well and eventually asked a taxi driver to drive me to one of the nearby airport hotels.
Upon arrival the hotel was booked, but they were kind enough to let me use their wifi to book another hotel.
The real problem came with getting a taxi, everyone that the hotel called wouldn’t come. Each one I would reserve on Lyft would cancel after 10 minutes. By the time a taxi finally agreed to pick me up it was almost 2am.
Once at the hotel, my booked room wasn’t available anymore. Remember that card I used to try to buy a sim card? It was flagged as fraud and because I used it to book my hotel room they had canceled my booking.
It took an hour, but they finally got me a room.
As Aeroflot wouldn’t reschedule bookings online I had to be up bright and early the next morning to return to the airport. For the next two days I was in lines to reschedule my flight. It was the most disorganized mess you could ever imagine.
It was more than 3 days later when I arrived in Russia.
Moral of the story: Check if your flight is cancelled before you go to the airport.
Analysis
As I narrow my search to travel and banking abroad, I want to learn a lot about all the times banking has gone WRONG while overseas. Where has the system failed? By closing in on these points, I’ll start getting closer and closer to where the system could be improved. The horror stories provided by this article mainly circulate around getting sick or injured, but the two that I included above both show how banking can be unnecessarily complicated at the worst possible moment. If electronic payments aren’t working, and you don’t have cash, what do you do? If your card gets flagged as fraud, how are you properly notified, and how can you prove that it’s you? Both of these stories show how very minor banking and spending inconveniences can truly destroy a trip with the right context.
Source
Clapperton, N. (2023, August 14). 30 travel horror stories you have to read to believe!. Nina Out and About. https://ninaoutandabout.ca/travel-horror-stories/
