A MAN who was hoping to visit Australia for the holiday of a lifetime was gutted to realise he'd booked flights to the wrong place.
Kingsley Burnett from New York had hoped to go down under for some winter sun, but realised he'd made a mistake when he saw mountains covered in snow.
The 62-year-old had instead booked to fly to Sidney – a small town in Montana with a population of around 6,000 people.
While Sydney in Australia has an average high temperature of 26C in February, Sidney, where Kingsley ended up, doesn't get much warmer than 2C this time of year.
According to Mr Burnett, the mistake arose after he got the airport codes mixed up.
Sydney, his intended destination is SYD. However, Sidney is pretty similar, with SDY.
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He said one of them ought to be changed to prevent people making the same mistake.
He told KTVQ News: “I saw a mountaintop covered in white snow. At that point, I knew I was in trouble.
“It’s a matter of acronyms. The S-Y-D as opposed to S-D-Y. Somebody has to fix that."
The first leg of Kingsley's flight took him from New York to Billings, Montana, where he had booked to transfer onto a different flight to the much smaller airport in Sidney.
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However, he ended spending the night in Billings before flying back home the next day.
Airport staff member Carol Castellano helped Kingsley get sorted after his error.
She said that he is not the first passenger to make the mistake either, with one other confused passenger ending up in Billings.
While he didn't get to go down under, Kingsley was said to still be in good spirits and was happy to have met someone as friendly as Carol.
He added: "Montana didn’t have kangaroos. It had Carol. And that was good enough for me."
Kingsley is far from the first passenger to end up on the wrong flight.
Last year, Marijose Gamboa was supposed to be flying to Tuxtla Gutierrez in Mexico from Guadalajara, but ended up in North West America after a mix up.
The traveller revealed how she had ended up in the wrong country in a series of videos on Tiktok, during which she claimed that airport staff had checked her boarding pass on more than one occasion.
Three hours into the journey, flight attendants asked Marijose and other passengers on the plane to fill out a boarding card.
However, she didn't understand what was being asked of her and had to ask the cabin crew for assistance with the document because it was in English.
It was only when someone sitting behind her on the plane explained what the form was and why she needed her passport information that she realised her mistake.
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Meanwhile, another Ryanair passenger missed their flight after boarding the wrong plane.
And a grandma missed her grandson's wedding after flying to Poland by mistake.
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