Some people just dont travel well!

I had a job that meant a LOT of traveling - and passing through airports and running for planes became pretty routine and I think in having to visit over 40 countries for work reasons over the last 15 years, I probably only missed one flight. I can board a plane, don my mask and be asleep before take off!

Other people just don't travel very well. Take my wife for instance - she is really unlucky when it comes to travelling.

10 years ago, and knowing her nervousness for flying, she was flying back to South Africa for our wedding a few days earlier than I was and decided to go to the airport 3 hours early! This in retrospect was a mistake. As Murphy’s Law would dictate everything went swimmingly so she was happily at the airport, passed through customs with like 2.5 hours still to spare. So she decided to go and have some lunch and a glass of wine at one of those overpriced airport restaurants. Placed her wedding dress next to her and bags at her feet and started surveying the airport in a relaxed manner. And no she didn’t overstay her welcome and miss her flight like a hen party situation that I once heard about, but moved to the correct terminal via the transit train well in time, exited through an immigration check and was waiting in the lounge when (duh) she realised she had forgotten her wedding dress in the restaurant. Cue a panic driven run back through immigration, across the airport to the restaurant, hurried discussion to recover the dress, run back through immigration to the waiting room to find the plane had actually backed off from its bay. Tears of despair given that she had missed her plane. Officials saying sorry you have missed your flight as all passengers were accounted for. Scratching of heads as it is evident that one passenger was not accounted for. Plane towed back into place and Sky Bridge re-linked. It seems a passenger had moved into my wife’s seat before take-off and they had accidently counted off the number of passengers and now had a problem of incorrect numbers seemingly best corrected by adding my wife. So she was back on with the whole plane giving here withering stares…but with dress and on her way to her wedding.

Cue forward 3 years and my wife accidently takes the wrong passport (without her UK visa) on holiday. We are actually stopped leaving Heathrow but get told by the immigration guy that it will be ok to return as all visa details are on the system so they will, let us back into the country. What followed was a glorious 2 weeks holiday only to be stopped in Johannesburg International airport without a valid visa for travel to the UK. Now we had my daughter (about 1 years old at the time) and I both on UK passports and my wife with no visa and an over officious airport representative. So we were forced to break up the family, I had to fly back with my daughter and then get the correct passport and return it to South Africa so my wife could join us two days later.

Cue another year and my wife wants to travel just with our daughter and we were aware of the rather stringent regulations put in place by South Africa when travelling with children. So we had well prepared for the need for an unabridged birth certificate, but didn’t realise that ‘affidavit’ of fathers parental consent actually meant it had to be notarised. Again an argument with an overly officious airline representative, a non-entry to the flight, a return home, visit to a notary, correct stamp and flight out 3 days later with flight change charge! Job done but the lesson learnt is that airline officials, especially when the airline seems to get fined by the country involved will interpret regulations far stricter than any immigration / customs official.

So my first thought was that it was an experience thing. It is true that people who fly a lot (a) usually gather points and upgrades which make flying more pleasant and (b) understand how the airports work, their layouts, not to queue behind the large non EU family when entering the EU etc. But there was this guy at work we called Captain Jinx as he was always the one getting caught out with travel, despite being a seasoned traveller. He routinely missed flights, got times wrong and seemed always so harried when traveling. He once left his laptop on an x-ray scanning machine in Moscow airport and only realised when he actually was comfortably seated in the plane and hurtling down the runway on takeoff! (And managed remarkably for Russia to get it back a week later, with the help of the Russian country manager and a lot of shouting).

So if it isn't experience and it isn't personality (my wife being very conscientious) then it must just be dumb luck!