When the holidays are upon us, you can try your best to plan the perfect gifts, activities, and meals, but travel nightmares are always waiting to unleash our collective inner Grinch.
Statistically speaking, traveling during the holidays may not be as awful as you think. However, travel horror stories have been known to strike.
Holiday travelers have experienced winter storms, computer glitches, and power outages on their way to celebrate Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s, and other holidays with loved ones.
From stomach viruses to flat tires, these horror stories may just make you want to spend your next holiday at home.
1. Scammed Out of a Christmas Cruise
Christmas cruises are a great way to celebrate the holidays with family or friends without the stress of planning, cooking, decorating, and hosting guests yourself. It’s also a hassle-free vacation: you won’t have to worry about the logistics of booking hotels, making dining reservations, or getting from one destination to the next.
There have been several horror stories on cruise ships over the years, and here’s one that may help you avoid scammers. Just before Christmas in 2014, eight families showed up at a Miami port with vouchers that let them board a Carnival cruise ship bound for the Bahamas.
Unluckily, the cruise staff was unable to find their reservations. It came out that they had been scammed by a shady travel company named Caribbean Cruise Line, which was eventually sued by 10 states as well as the Federal Trade Commission.
2. Crashing After Christmas
In 2010, a few days after Christmas with family in Denver, Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan got to the airport only to find out that her flight home to New York had just been canceled due to an impending snowstorm. This was about to be only the beginning of her holiday experience.
She was able to reschedule for the next morning, but when she arrived at the airport, she learned her flight had once again been canceled. After spending the night at her sister’s house, which was nearby, she got into a cab the next morning for her third ride to the airport. It was snowing a lot, so the taxi spun out on the highway and collided with a guardrail.
Both Kelsey and the driver were left unconscious, but fortunately, they were uninjured. After “four days of anguish”, she was eventually able to fly back home the following morning.
3. Displaced by a Hurricane
When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005, the dangerous storm forced a lot of New Orleans residents to leave their homes and evacuate the city. Months later, many of those people were living out of motels and hotels across the country.
Approximately 2,000 people traveled to New York, where they booked a place to live. Beneta Davis was among them, and she had her whole family of eight with her. Although they spent several weeks at a dull motel, they were happy to find a temporary place to stay.
Even so, Davis and her family were concerned about how to spend holidays in their weird, temporary surroundings. “I guess we’ll have a piece of pizza, go to the parade, or something. We barely have any money left,” she said. “I always cooked a big Thanksgiving supper.”
4. Losing More Than Luggage on Christmas
Here’s another holiday horror story you’ll be grateful you’re not telling. Jennifer Jedow, the founder of a website design company, shared her experience about getting into a Caprice Classic station wagon with her parents and her three siblings and driving to Vermont for the holidays.
Her dad had fastened a lot of stuff — gifts, suitcases, even a computer — to the roof of the car, and that’s how everything started. As they traveled down the highway, things started to fall off. “I suddenly saw stuff flying into the highway behind us,” Jennifer said.
Her dad pulled over and started running back to recover the fallen items, dodging cars as he did so. “It was complete chaos”, she said.
5. Pooped Out for Christmas
Traveling with children can be a challenge, especially if it’s a toddler who’s in the midst of potty training. One reader told us of a Christmas trip from San Francisco, CA, to Milwaukee, WI, when explosive diarrhea hit twice before takeoff.
“You don’t really know fear until you know your toddler can erupt at any moment and you have only one diaper and no extra clothes,” the beleaguered parent recounted. The chaos persisted even after the parents had bought diapers during a stopover in Minneapolis and had changed the little one.
“Our son choked on a biscuit while we were sitting in the food court and ended up vomiting all over his new pants, so I had to take them to the bathroom and wash them with water and soap. Finally, I had to dry them under the hand dryer”.
6. Frozen for the Holidays
Here’s another holiday experience from one of our readers. While driving from Iowa to Wisconsin to see family for the holidays in a Mazda RX-8, he soon learned that a compact sports car wasn’t suitable for driving in an ice storm.
After his car spun out several times on the freeway, he decided to book the last available room at a nearby hotel. But bad luck, the power went out. “There was no heat, so the temperature went down to freezing in my hotel room”. No eateries in the area were open either.
The weary traveler resumed the journey the following day, but it took him several more challenges, including a snow-blocked freeway exit, before arriving in Madison.
“What would normally be a three- or four-hour trip took me nearly a day and a half.”
7. Barely Avoiding Disaster
Two days after Christmas in 2016, a small plane carrying only four passengers over central Alberta, Canada, started to experience engine issues. As it approached the airport, the pilot believed landing on the highway would be a good idea. However, he decided against it as there was too much traffic.
He eventually chose to make an emergency glide landing on a nearby runway. The plane landed short, almost hitting a berm and a power pole. “It definitely was a Christmas miracle, especially since the plane had basically run out of power,” one of the passengers said. “God alone knows what would have happened if we had hit all those things.”
8. Stuck at the Airport on Christmas Eve
More than 15,000 travelers were affected on Christmas Eve 2013, when around 100 flights came to a standstill at London’s Gatwick Airport. But that’s not all. With no heat and only one operational toilet in the airport, chaos ensued as people learned they wouldn’t be returning home to spend the holidays with their families. Those who have been stuck in an airport at least once understand how this feels.
“The whole waiting area was like an underdeveloped Third World country”, one of the affected travelers said. “This is London, so we’re supposed to have a hub of global transport. It was so embarrassing and an awful catastrophe”.
9. Stranded in Rome
In 2009, while living in Italy, Laura Itzkowitz, a Travel + Leisure editor, accepted an invitation to celebrate the winter holidays with a friend’s family in England. Unluckily, she found herself stuck in an airport in Rome after all flights to London, which had been affected by snowfall, were delayed.
“I tried to stay calm, but the following day wasn’t any better,” Laura said. “By the time I was finally in London, overwhelmed and exhausted, many trains were either delayed or canceled, so I had to stand in the aisle of a train for the whole 1.5-hour trip to Northampton.”
You may also want to read 10 Biggest Issues Travelers Face.
