CAUTIONARY TALE: The Travel Mistake You Never Want to Make

I travel a lot. Not full time or for work or anything, but any chance I get to explore a new place, I take it. Thus, I’m very used to booking flights, creating detailed itineraries, analyzing hotel and activity reviews before locking them in, etc. Between the practice I’ve had planning trips for years + my Type-A personality, I pride myself on my trips running as smoothly as possible.

All this is exactly why I felt my stomach drop through the floor when I realized I messed up big time booking our Munich trip.

At the gate, we put our boarding passes on the scanner and got a red error sign. Tried again – same result. It didn’t make sense. We were at the right gate. This was Lufthansa flight 434 going from Chicago to Munich at 9:10PM. The gate agents seemed just as confused why our boarding passes weren’t scanning. After a couple minutes of searching the computer, they realized where I’d royally screwed up: it was Thursday, June 30 and I had booked the flight for Friday, July 1. *cue internal panic attack*

I immediately started spiraling, not understanding how this possibly could have happened. I quadruple check every detail of the trip before we leave. I searched my email to find my confirmation, which confirmed my error. Our trip was only 6 days long, so the thought of losing a whole day off our itinerary (including a food tour I was very excited about) made me want to cry.

The gate agents were also very confused how we’d even made it as far as the gate. Lufthansa’s policy is to allow check ins beginning 23 hours in advance of the flight. We had been able to check in ~40 hours before our booked flight and obtained mobile boarding passes. We didn’t check any bags (where they presumably may have caught this error), and we had no issues going through TSA, even though we had to scan our boarding passes there.

Thankfully, this story does have a happy ending. The gate agents were incredibly nice and sympathetic to our issue. We were among the last few people to try to board (no need to be in a rush with assigned seating), so the plane was almost ready to push back. Two other people hadn’t made their connections, so the flight had 2 economy seats open, and they treated us as standby passengers and gave us new boarding passes. Even better, we were able to trade seats so we could sit together as we’d originally planned.

I was a little worried afterwards that when we didn’t take our original flight that they’d cancel our return, as airlines often do, but luckily everything was adjusted correctly in their system and we had no issues on the return.

This very close call almost threw a huge wrench in our plans but instead just taught me a huge lesson: always always ALWAYS ensure your flights are booked for the correct day, especially when it’s flight that takes off and lands on different days (i.e. a red eye).  

You can read the full recap of my Munich trip here.