Turkish Airlines mistake lands couple on the wrong continent

A geographical mix-up that lead an American couple to wake up on the wrong continent has the pair vowing to double-, even triple-check their airline codes from now on.

A report in the Los Angeles Times describes the story of Sandy Valdivieso and her husband on the vacation that had them hopping around the globe. And not because they wanted to.

Valdivieso and her husband booked a flight from Los Angeles to the country of Dakar, in Senegal. They bought the tickets, packed the bags and boarded the Turkish Airlines flight, following the airport code DAC.

And that's where the trouble started.

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Valdivieso told the Times she and her husband fell asleep after boarding their connecting flight from Istanbul and then opened their eyes to an image of the map, showing the plane over the Middle East. Dakar is in western Africa. They were headed the wrong way.

That's because DAC is the airport code for Dhaka, Bangladesh, nearly 15,000 kilometres away from the couple's destination in Senegal. Valdivieso and her husband were on the wrong side of an airline staffer's mistake — and virtually on the wrong side of the world.

After a flight to Senegal with no further cost and months of calls to the airline seeking compensation for the nightmare, the couple told the newspaper they had received two free tickets to anywhere Turkish Airlines flies.

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Plus a lesson in verifying everything.

During a similar incident in 1985, a sleepy student in Sacramento booked a flight to Oakland, California, only to wind up travelling across the globe to Auckland, New Zealand, when he misheard the city's name, according to the Los Angeles Times archives. The student's explanation?

"They didn't say Auckland. They said Oakland. They talk different."

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