Travel Mistakes You Should Avoid
Luckily for me I don’t need to travel much on business these days. On a recent business trip to America I think I made almost every mistake in the book.
Things started to go wrong when I arrived at Gatwick airport in my car only to find that there were no more available airport parking spaces in the car parks close to my airport terminal. I ended up taking a space in a car park miles away and had to pay top dollar for the privelige.
This delayed my getting to the checkin desk and I was already a bit late. The check in desk staff were not happy with me as I should have arrived a whole hour earlier. They also told me that I could have checked in online and printed my boarding pass myself before leaving home. Well you live and learn I suppose.
The early start had meant leaving home without eating breakfast so I thought I’d get a bite from one of the many airport restaurants. I couldn’t believe what they were charging for a full English breakfast and if I wasn’t travelling on expenses I wouldn’t have been too happy at paying the extortionate airport prices.
I arrived in Atlanta and immediately headed for one of the car hire suppliers. It turned out that there were a whole load of conferences in town and most of their more comfortable models had already been hired out. I ended up accepting a Chevrolet pickup for my two day visit. If I’d booked in advance I’d have saved my employers some money and probably got the car that I wanted.
When I returned to Atlanta airport for my homeward journey I omitted to remove my keys from my pocket and had chosen a different belt which has a heavy metal buckle. This resulted in my undergoing no less than three body scans before I successfully passed through the security check.
It was after I’d boarded the aircraft that I realised that I had left my PDA somewhere in the airport. Or it had been stolen from my pocket. It wasn’t until I got home that I found out that my travel insurance policy didn’t cover lost or stolen items like this. I wished that I had checked before leaving and taken out a gadget insurance policy.
It’s pretty obvious that I am a little out of practice when it comes to air travel these days. I think I should simply stay put here in the UK.