Last updated on January 23rd, 2016 at 05:49 am
What is an acceptable mistake rate while booking travel accommodations?
Seriously. What is a reasonable percentage of the time that you might expect to screw up your travel bookings?
For many of us, the answer is probably 0%. We don’t want to screw up any of the details of our travels. Getting things wrong can cost us hundreds of dollars in change fees, rate hikes and more.
Getting trip details perfectly lined up is something I was able to do pretty regularly when I was only traveling internationally 1-2 weeks a year. Really, one of the only times I messed up was not checking the visa entry requirements in Mauritius for our honeymoon. My passport expired in less than 6 months, and I was denied boarding on my flight. Thankfully that worked out in the end (actually worked out really well because I earned full business class mileage credit on an award ticket), but at the time we were very shaken by the experience.
I screwed up again this March when I booked one Hilton Airport hotel near MSP, took the shuttle to the incorrect hotel, and realized that I was in the wrong place. A $20 Uber ride later and I was back where I needed to be.
We can make mistakes like booking flights for the wrong dates, hotel rooms for the wrong date or location, or even renting the wrong car. On a long enough timeline, it happens to all of us.
Over the years, I would estimate that I screw up my travel bookings in some way, shape or form about 1-2% of the time. That’s a very small percentage, and on most trips it means travel is planned relatively smoothly. Most of us probably make mistakes at a similar rate.
But now that we are traveling full time, I find that I am making mistakes about once a month in booking our travels. It is still 1-2% of the total bookings we make, but the frequency of screw-ups has risen to once every 60 days or so.
My latest screw up: Booking a flight back to the US a day early
I was so excited to see saver award space on Delta from LHR to MSP a few weeks ago that I booked it right away to put a stake in the ground. I triple-checked my dates and was confident that I needed to fly out that day. Even if I was wrong, I could always change the dates for free as a Platinum medallion.
My confidence was so high that I booked a flight for Mrs. Jeffsetter as well. I knew I couldn’t change her ticket for free, but I was certain that this was the day we would be leaving.
The 24 hour free cancellation period passed, and I started to look at our hotel situation for London.
It turns out that I had booked the Radisson Blu Edwardian using the last of the BOGO offers, and the nights that conflicted with the flight I had just booked. Basically, we had a hotel room reserved for a night we would already be back in the United states.
Again, this happens maybe 1-2% of the time, but I am embarrassed that I was so confident I had my dates right before booking. I had weeks to get things right, but missed my dates completely.
My choice was either to pay at least $150 in change fees with Delta to stay one night longer in London, or cancel my hotel reservation with Club Carlson and lose the free night I had received by using my Club Carlson credit card.
In the end, I chose to cancel my reservation with Club Carlson and refund the 44,000 points into my account. I can’t tell you how painful that was!
The final decision came down to wanting to save cash more than getting the most from the points.
On the bright side, I was able to use some of these points to book a third night at the Radisson Blu Sydney using cash and points.
While it’s not nearly as good of a redemption, it was better than paying change fees.
Another bonus? Since we now found ourselves with 0 nights booked in London, I was able to use Mrs. Jeffsetter’s Hyatt free nights at the Andaz. This saved us over $500 per night!
So in the end we lost the last of our Bogo offers with Club Carlson, but will have stays at a nicer hotel in both Sydney and London. My mistake helped me make a little lemonade in the end.
Dealing with Time Zones While Traveling
I will tell you that dealing with time zones and international datelines has been a lot more difficult than I thought. Google is my best friend to figure things out. For example, I type a query like this into Google at least 3 times a day:
Figuring out where to stay is like paint by numbers. I am filling in spreadsheets. Booking for times that I don’t always understand. I am constantly second-guessing myself and trying to get things right. Here is a sample of the spreadsheet I use to keep track of everything:
There are several nights where I have to triple check to make sure that we have a hotel booked for a given night. This would be easy if it were once in a while, but we already have 3 nights where no hotel will be needed on our travels (because of overnight flights or crossing the international dateline).
My biggest fear is having nowhere to sleep when we arrive at our destination. It’s probably an irrational fear – that would almost never happen – but it does concern me.
Does this lead to increased mistakes? Probably. Or perhaps we just need to book so many more nights that the mistake rate of 1-2% just happens more often.
I wanted to book a last minute hotel for a small internal conference last week so I could stay at the same hotel as a coworker as to save on transportation costs and to have someone to possibly eat dinner with etc. She said she was staying at the Marriott suites hotels. I assumed she meant the Townplace Suites but she meant the Springhill Suites. We did not figure this out until we were at the airport at the conference location and we were trying to figure out transportation. Turns out other coworkers who had cars were staying at each hotel so we had rides all week.
Glad it worked out for you! The exact same thing happened to me in Minneapolis a few years back. I was supposed to speak “at the Marriott downtown”. There are like 5 Marriott properties downtown. Of course, I chose the wrong one multiple times, and arrived about 3 minutes before the presentation at the actual place.
Might be a good idea to get some better naming conventions, Marriott :).
I did searches for weeks and wrote a blog post about getting LAN business class seat for the familys with AA miles. Long story short, you have about one day to book at 331 days out, or forget it. We were in Bali, 13 hours off of our time zone, when it came time to book our return. I checked at 3 AM Lima time and seats weren’t available to book yet. The next time I thought about it, it was 6 AM in Lima the next day, and too late.
So we booked AM seats with Delta miles instead. Diversification is good!
Don’t you hate it when your current travel gets in the way of future travel? Happens to the best of us! As long as you were enjoying Bali properly, then you made the right choice!
I am traveling right now 6 hours ahead of where I normally am and am doing okay except I can’t seem to figure out how to post things on the blog at the times I want them…
Yeah, I still can’t figure that out sometimes. 6 hours is nothing, though. It’s still the same day! I’m 7 hours behind in NZ, but a day ahead. It’s weird.
Thanks for this post! I screwed up a hotel reservation last week by booking my free IHG night at a hotel other than the one I intended. Fortunately, I was able to correct it without penalty. Glad to hear I’m not the only one to make these mistakes!
Glad it all worked out for you!
We showed up in Copenhagen a couple of months ago at the wrong Radisson Blu, booked with BOGO nights from the credit card. As it turns out, we really enjoyed the location of the second one, which was good, as we had 2 nights there again at the end of our trip. (And it was 44,000 points per night instead of 50,000 or 70,000.)
Yes! I had the darndest time figuring out my hotel situation in Copenhagen. I ended up staying at the one across from the Tivoli Gardens (Royal), which is supposedly the nice one. But it still had bugs everywhere :).
Glad you got it sorted out in the end.