{"id":15573,"date":"2023-09-05T13:43:25","date_gmt":"2023-09-05T17:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/?p=15573"},"modified":"2023-09-05T13:43:27","modified_gmt":"2023-09-05T17:43:27","slug":"30-travel-horror-stories-you-have-to-read-to-believe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/2023\/09\/05\/30-travel-horror-stories-you-have-to-read-to-believe\/","title":{"rendered":"30 Travel Horror Stories You Have to Read to Believe!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

1. A Travel Horror Story in Morocco<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once I arrived in Turkey, I thought the nightmare would be over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until I realized I was a day early for my Visa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To enter Turkey, you need a visitor\u2019s Visa that you can buy online for $75. I had done this months earlier when I\u2019d initially planned to arrive in Turkey. I\u2019d even booked it a week early just in case!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It hadn\u2019t even occurred to me to check the Visa when I\u2019d rescheduled my trip. I was certain I\u2019d be fine!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, they won\u2019t let you into the country, even if you\u2019re green at the gills and are clearly about to pass out in front of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026come to think of it, that may have been why they didn\u2019t want to let me in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thankfully, they have kiosks at the airport to buy a new visa. They weren\u2019t 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\u2019t leave for three days except to go to the hospital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moral of the travel horror story<\/strong>: check your Visas and don\u2019t eat salad in Morocco.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

19. The Booking Nightmare by The Fearless Foreigner\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

My year teaching and living in Russia<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was making the most of my last day in the Big Apple and wasn\u2019t too concerned about the forecasted snowstorm. I headed to the airport as usual, taking public transportation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The subway line had a detour and wasn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t have a US phone plan and had no way of calling a taxi. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as I was going to give up, a taxi arrived and the driver seemed very surprised that my flight wasn\u2019t canceled. I assured him it wasn\u2019t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As wifi wasn\u2019t 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<\/a>. 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Upon arrival the hotel was booked, but they were kind enough to let me use their wifi to book another hotel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The real problem came with getting a taxi, everyone that the hotel called wouldn\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once at the hotel, my booked room wasn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It took an hour, but they finally got me a room. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Aeroflot wouldn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was more than 3 days later when I arrived in Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moral of the story<\/strong>: Check if your flight is cancelled before you go to the airport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analysis<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Source<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clapperton, N. (2023, August 14).\u00a030 travel horror stories you have to read to believe!<\/em>. Nina Out and About. https:\/\/ninaoutandabout.ca\/travel-horror-stories\/\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s Visa that you can buy online for $75. I had done this months earlier when I\u2019d initially planned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":110,"featured_media":15579,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-15573","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-focus"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/110"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15573"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15580,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15573\/revisions\/15580"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}