Gran ends up in Caribbean instead of Spain in holiday flight mix-up

A British grandmother who booked a holiday to Spain ended up in the Caribbean by mistake - after a booking blunder caused a mix-up with the flights.

Lamenda Kingdon, 62, had booked the trip to Granada, Spain, using her late husband's air miles as part of a "bucket list" of activities after being diagnosed with breast cancer and a brain tumour.

But instead of booking Mrs Kingdon on a two-hour flight, air miles travel firm Avios put her on a 10-hour British Airways flight to Grenada, in the Caribbean. She only realised the mistake two hours into her flight last month when she told a passenger she was looking forward to seeing the Alhambra Palace, and the passenger replied: "Not on this flight, you won't be."

According to the Daily Mail, she said: "I looked at the ticket and it did indeed say Grenada. I had noticed the departure and arrival times were vastly different – but I presumed that had something to do with the time difference."

Mrs Kingdon was eventually put on a flight back to Gatwick at a scheduled stop in St Lucia.

She was put up in a hotel for the night and had her points reimbursed, while a flight to Malaga, the nearest major airport to Granada, was arranged for the following day.

An apologetic Avios also gave her enough points for her next dream destination of New Zealand.

And the ending is even happier than that, because since her return from her trip, Mrs Kingdon has been given the all clear by her cancer doctors and hopes to make her next trip next year.

She told the Plymouth Herald: "Looking back on the Granada mix up, I genuinely don't blame anyone.

"The person on the other end of the phone probably just misheard me. I honestly didn't notice the spelling difference.

"But I'm certainly not complaining. They treated me wonderfully once they found out what had happened."

Related articles

British gran books holiday in Portugal - and ends up in Spain

Airline mix-up delivers wrong bodies to two funerals