We had a booq Taipan lift to give away. To enter we asked one simple question- “What is your worst travel story ever?”

Well we’ve picked our winner, and his travel nightmare and Gear Diary user name follow.

So how was your trip?

Not so good…

I was traveling back from Madras to Washington DC. This was the return part of my trip. So I had assumed that you really did not have to confirm with the airlines. Due to the way I had booked my trip, I was to travel from Madras to Bombay, change planes and travel from there to Delhi, another change of plane, fly to London and from there to Washington DC. My flight from Madras to Bombay went of fine with no issues. I land at Bombay and was told that all flights to Delhi were delayed due to fog problems at Delhi. Then to my surprise I was told that since I had not confirmed my ticket, my ongoing flights were not booked.

I spent most of the day in the Bombay airport trying to get on a flight to Delhi. Finally late afternoon, I managed to catch a flight to Delhi. Now I had the same problem in Delhi. They did not have me booked to London and onto DC. I was booked on a codeshare flight so that meant I had to spend all of my evening and most of the night trying to convince two sets of airline folk that they had to help me get on a flight to Washington DC. Finally around 12AM, they agreed to get me on a flight to DC. Now it was too late to go anywhere out to sleep, so I ended up spending the night trying to sleep in the airport on a hard uncomfortable chair.
The next day again all flights were delayed due to fog. Now due to this, another person who was on that flight and me realized that we would miss our connecting flight to DC. So we asked the airline folks what were our options. They said they would route the two of us onto a flight to New York and from NY we would be on a flight to DC. So now we agreed to this option. Now we got to London and made it to the NY flight. However something went wrong and we were delayed in taking off by a couple of hours. The reason we learnt later was that they had problems loading luggage onto it.

So now we arrive in NY about two hours late and learn that we missed the last flight out to DC. So we would have to be put in a hotel and then take a flight out the next day. I was relieved that I would at least get to sleep in a nice bed. But then when I went to collect my baggage, I found that of my two checked in baggage, only one was available. It turned out that due to a routing mistake at London, my friend’s and one of my baggage had been routed off to DC. So now we had to collect them at DC. We had to wait for a while to get to the hotel and it was rather late (around 3PM or so) before I got back to sleep.

Next day my friend and I came to the airport early only to learn we were booked on an afternoon flight to DC. We spent the morning in the airport. When we board our flight when I was told that my carry-on was to large and so had to be checked in. Finally we arrive at DC. I find my checked in carry on had arrived but my other checked in baggage was on a later flight. The baggage that was misrouted arrived on the flight from London about 3 hours later. So I spent another four hours in the airport. My friend was able to convince kind customs official to retrieve our luggage for us.

So finally I arrived home about 24 hours later than I was supposed, having spent countless hours in 5 airports along with 2 nights.

The author of the travel story and the winner of the Taipan lift is… Arvindr

Congrats!