Little late to the party, but I was trying to catch a flight to see my long distance boyfriend. I was supposed to leave right after class (I was in college) but decided to take my time and run by my house to pick up a few things and chat with my roommates. Well, there was a ton of traffic and I ended up having to sprint through the airport to my gate. I had a backpack and was sprinting in flip flops, wearing a dress. Didn’t feel my dress riding up, caught in my backpack, as I ran, so I guarantee half that airport saw my bare ass (I now wear shorts under my dresses). Got to the gate as the plane was pulling away from the gate and started SOBBING, knowing my kind of dick boyfriend would yell at me and say I told you so. The gate agents took pity on me, crying with my butt hanging out, and moved me to a next morning flight at no charge.
Flying back from China 4-5 months ago. Checked in at the airport. Turned out you needed a COVID test to come back into the U.K. So I missed the flight. That sucked but then I had to try getting a rapid COVID test in the middle of the night; ended up at a public Chinese hospital where no one spoke English. Fucking nightmare.
Schiptol in Amsterdam is my most hated airport I have ever visited. Last year it had huge wait times and even after "it was back to normal", it was often that the queues were ridiculously long.
So when you have to wait 4,5 hours just to get to security check, you know that you will miss your flight for sure... So I had to take a night train to Duesseldorf, wait all night in the airport, and get the first flight home. Which was delayed 2 hours....
Never missed a flight, but my luggage once went to Manchester and I went to London. We were both supposed to go to London. I had just left my finacee in the US (we’re married now), I was jet-lagged, and just wanted to go home and be heartbroken, and Monarch Airlines sucked anyway. Either way, I think me blowing my stack at the baggage rep. was not one of my finer moments.
Got my luggage back a week later with a $25 check to apologize. Hmmph.
When I was in the military I had to fly from Seattle to Wichita Falls, TX for training. With a connecting flight in DFW… I get to the airport Sunday morning and discovered I missed my flight by an hour because of daylight savings time. This was after my ex swore up and down daylight savings was the following week.
So, I call the military travel office and they get me another flight to DFW, but there are no more flights to Wichita Falls. Since I had to be in class the next morning, they told me they’d get a one-way rental. The only catch is they had to call my commander and get authorization. Not my boss, or my bosses boss or anyone even close. The freaking commander.
Luckily for me my older sister lived in Dallas. So, I tell them not to wake up my commander at 7 am on Sunday because my dumbass believed my ex, and that I’d call them right back. I get ahold of my sister, explained the situation and she agreed to drive me 2 1/2 hours to Wichita Falls. I call back the travel office and and they book me a flight that is scheduled to get into DFW at 2pm. Then it gets delayed and delayed and delayed. I land around 10:30pm and my sister drives me to Wichita Falls. We get in around 1am. And she still has to drive back home and go to work the next day. 20+ years later I still feel bad about it, but totally greatful for having an awesome sister.
Fun fact: Saturday morning flights out of New Orleans are the most missed flights in the United States. I was told this by a gate agent when my flight out on a Friday was cancelled due to weather.
“Just come really early tomorrow morning and you’ll get on that flight. They always have room because of that.”
I hate packing because I have to make many decisions and remember of previous packing experiences where I used less than half of the clothes, so I keep rearranging until last minute.
Anyway, this time I had an intense two weeks at work preparing things before I went on my holiday. I had to wake up at 4:45am to go into the airport but the last time I messed up with the bags was 1:30am on the same day. “No biggie” I thought, and I set the alarm for 4:45 and slept.
When I wake up, the first thing I remember thinking was “damn, that was a nice, deep sleep. I feel good”. The sun was shining gently through the curtains and it felt like a great Saturday morning A few seconds later I realize something was off. I reach my phone and look at the time: something past 11am.
Long story short I had to buy an one way ticket and luckily there was another flight on the afternoon.
The aftermath: I don’t trust my mobile phone to wake me up. I set two separate alarms to wake me up if I have one of those very early morning flights. If I am in a hotel, I also request two separate wake up calls, just to be sure.
The year was 2010, and I was living abroad at the time. I was visiting the old country for a few days to renew my passport, and the day before I was supposed to fly back to where I lived, two things happened:
Ran into this FWB i knew before moving abroad.
Eyjafjallajökull had a volcanic eruption, shutting down air traffic in all of northern Europe.
Long story short, my FWB and I reconnected in the extra time I was given, and things developed further than they ever had before. Today we have a house and four kids together. I think it’s getting serious.
Today we have a house and four kids together. I think it’s getting serious.
You can’t be too sure about that. They could just be being nice. Maybe they are like that with everyone. Better play it safe and burn the house down to see how they really feel.
This was 30+ years ago, but I misread my tickets and missed my original flight out of Tampa headed to Chicago with a stop in Atlanta. I rebooked another about 3 hours later, but when I got to Atlanta, I found out my original connecting flight to Chicago crashed in Indiana due to ice on the wings. That could have been me. RIP to those who made that flight.
Foreigner flying out of Chicago, and no one explained that the pass I was given at check in wasn’t my boarding pass. My flight is almost boarded before I realised that a seat number wasn’t printed on the pass. I went to the counter to find out what I’m supposed to do, and the flight had been overbooked.
Neither of these are normal where I’m from. You get the boarding pass with your seat when you check in, and flights are never deliberately overbooked.
Hungover after my wedding. We took too long at the hotel breakfast and had to drive about an hour to get to the airport.
Tried to buy a new ticket at the airport for my honeymoon and the agent laughed at me. They don’t sell tickets at the airport… So I had to stand in front of them, buy a ticket on my phone, then approach the agent. Who knew?
Someone once told me “if you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports”. I think about that a lot in a lot of other contexts - sometimes being too safe comes with more of a cost than the risk!
I think this is terrible advice for most people. You only need to spend like an hour in the airport to avoid missing a flight. Most people don’t fly often enough to get much actual gain from pushing this boundary. The only person I knew who would push the envelope like this was someone who flew every week for work. That makes sense to me, because you’re saving two hours every week for years. If you’re only flying a few times a year just pack a book and ensure you make your flight on time.
I’ve been on like six flights in my life. I am absolutely not spending too much time in airports by not missing a flight. What a fucking out of touch thing to say.
Another almost-miss. I visited a friend in Germany, and the final leg home was from “Dusseldorf Weser” airport, which I naïvely assumed was like “London Heathrow”, and just the full name of Dusseldorf airport where I’d flown in.
Lucky, I got there 3h in advance, and when I couldn’t find the Ryan Air (yep!) counter, information filled me in. …One mad taxi rush across the city, then a bus I would’ve missed if it wasn’t late, and I got to this little airport way out of town 5min before the gate closed!
10 mins later, a group of guys got on the plane. They’d had a beer waiting for the Ryan Air counter to show up at Dusseldorf, and realised too late - got a taxi all the way to Weser arriving 5 min after gate closing. Luckily they were allowed to board anyway!
Thankfully I have never missed a flight, but one time for a moment I thought I had.
When I purchase tickets and get an email from the airline, gmail will summarize the flight details at the top of the mail. So it adds a blurb on top that isn't part of the actual mail. It usually works but one time it set the departure date as the date I received my email, not the departure date in the contents of the email.
For a moment I thought I had messed up when ordering the tickets, but reading the contents calmed me down.
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