Turkish Airlines screws up, sends couple 11,000 km in wrong direction

A quick slip of the keyboard and an incorrect destination code sent a couple more than 11,000 km away from their expected destination. Their mistake? They didn’t double check their tickets.

According to the LA Times, a couple, Sandy Valdivieso and Triet Vo, who had bought tickets to Dakar, Senegal, on the West Coast of Africa from Los Angeles, was mistakenly taken to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, which is not only 11,000 km away from their destination but another continent all together!

[caption id=“attachment_804987” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] The mishap took place due to a three-digit code that is printed on tickets.[/caption]

The mishap took place due to the three-letter airport code that airlines use while making reservations or entering information on baggage tags. Instead of entering DKR (for Dakar) in the computer system, the airline representative entered DAC (for Dhaka).

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“I guess we were just going by the flight number on our tickets, and that DAC was printed on them,” Sandy Valdivieso told the Los Angeles Times. “You just assume everything is correct.”

The couple only realised that they were heading in the wrong direction when their connecting flight from Istanbul was enroute to Dhaka and they happened to peer at the route map of the flight’s progress after a quick nap. By the time they realised they were heading in the wrong direction, it was too late. What’s worse is that even when the flight attendant announced the plane was heading to Dhaka, the couple didn’t suspect anything. They just assumed that’s s the way they pronounce Dakar in a Turkish accent.

Once they arrived in Bangladesh, Turkish Airlines agreed to fly them back to Istanbul and onto Dakar without any charge, but the couple was not satisfied with this compensation.

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The flight to the wrong continent actually took place in December, but it has taken months for Turkish Air to acknowledge that they owed the couple some compensation for the ordeal. After all the media coverage, the airline finally proposed two free economy-class tickets to anywhere the carrier flies in Turkey.