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Comment by RegnisGnaw | Hacker News Reader

I lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada (eh?) for 23 years and we have similar stories.

There is an island that is part of Nova Scotia called Cape Breton with a city named Sydney (so Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada) with population of ~30K. Every few years we get a tourist that confuses that with Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

They generally realize something is wrong when they switch planes in Halifax from a Jet (Boeing 737, Airbus 320, etc) to a 19 person turboprop for the last few hundred kilometers to Sydney.

News Articles:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2172858.stm

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/italian-tourists-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/31/teen-accidenta...

Wikipedia Link:

Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney,_Nova_Scotia

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney

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My favorite similar pair is Yinchuan (a city in western China) vs. Incheon (a satellite city of Seoul and where their bigger airport is).

They sound very similar in Chinese, and in China people usually refer to Incheon airport as "the Seoul airport" (a lot of average Chinese people probably don't even know Seoul has another airport), and to make things worse, the IATA airport codes for the two are INC vs. ICN.

So the urban legend is that for a lot of Koreans living in Beijing, when they are planning to go back to Korea, they go to a travel agent on the street (this was around 2000 so online booking were not ubiquitous) using their not so fluent Chinese to say "I need a flight ticket to Incheon", the agent will often book them to Yinchuan instead. Korean Air had a direct flight between Yinchuan and Incheon for a while (they probably still have that flight) and the urban legend is that flight is mainly for those confused travellers.

> a lot of average Chinese people probably don't even know Seoul has another airport

I'd guess most people who haven't traveled domestically in Korea don't know this, full stop.

Gimpo's fairly big for business travel among the big East Asian cities too - Tokyo, Osaka, Taipei, Shanghai and Beijing (and maybe some others?) all have direct flights. In most cases those flights are to the more convenient "city" airport in those cities too.

I've been flying in and out of Seoul for years from Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, etc and I've never once been offered a flight to Gimpo. Could be an artifact of always flying the same airlines (mostly CX/SQ) though.

CX might have used to have a flight to Gimpo, but not now, and SQ doesn’t. I’ve flown there internationally on JAL, China Southern, Shanghai Airlines, and China Airlines, maybe some others.

I did notice that corp travel agents sometimes only search Incheon and need to be reminded that Gimpo exists.

The real fun is when you have to go from Gimpo to Inchon on a short connection because your company’s travel agents don’t know.

Three years ago I booked a flight to San Juan (SJU), Puerto Rico by mistake. I was supposed to go to San Jose (SJO) in Costa Rica.

I will never forget the moment I read "SJO" in the email realizing I should have booked a flight to "SJU". Then going into Google, and typing SJO to find out where I was actually flying. I was prepared for it to be in Asia, Africa or anywhere. Luckily, Puerto Rico was just a small detour to Costa Rica (flew from Europe) :-)

I once booked san jose, costa rica instead of san jose, california. Discovered this already at the airport

SJC vs SJO

Me too! Exactly the same confusion. I thankfully discovered it a day-or-two before my flight and was able to correct the mistake.

Ha! I've got a friend who, on his very early 20s, wanted to stay for a while in Ireland to learn English while working (Madrid, Spain, here). He had a big farewell party, drank a bit too much, and missed his flight early in the morning, only to find that he had booked a flight to BERLIN instead of DUBLIN.

He was so lucky to miss it, imagine that hangover-y arrival to Berlin imagining it's Ireland.

How does one mix up Berlin and Dublin? Because of Pronunciation?

I'd imagine it has something to do with the phenomenon wehre you can raed the wrdos in a sntecnee eevn if tehy are jmlbued up. Plus being drunk would magnify the chance to mistake BERLIN for DUBLIN. The last halves of the words arethe same, and so do B and D as well as B and R if you squint.

shrugs In Spanish the accent for both Berlin and Dublin is in the last silabe, so it sounds a bit more similar than in English. This plus being naive, young and careless, I suppose... :D

I once called a travel agent to book a flight to San Jose (California). She mis-heard me as wanting to go to Santa Fe (New Mexico). She called me a few days later in a panic, saying "Sorry, I accidentally booked you a flight to San Jose. I'll cancel it and re-book it". Two wrongs do make a right.

Extra bonus fun: Concur, everybody's favorite corporate flight booking engine, shows both Sydney, Nova Scotia and Sydney, New South Wales as "Sydney, NS" in the destination selection dropdown.

No way, that's really dumb. New South Wales is always NSW to me.

Can concur, I live in Sydney, NSW and have made the mistake in concur myself. Fortunately just for listing the city I had a meal in, not for booking a flight.

I wonder if it’s limited to 2 letters.

A lot of smaller platforms I've worked with, before address validation became a standard library to pull in, would have a two character field for state if they were developed in the USA. Most things developed outside the USA tend to put no limit on it.

For Concur I think it was built on top of the limitations of the global platforms most airlines use that were designed a long time ago for mainframes that didn't have a lot of memory. (There was something about dates once...).

Working on platforms built for industries that relied so heavily on mainframes reminds me of the apocryphal story that the space shuttle was the size it was because it parts had to travel on railways that were built to a standard size that matched horse drawn wagons which were built to a standard size for two horses abreast. Or to summarise, the size of the space shuttle was determined by two horses arses...

At one point there was an ISO standard for Australian state and territory abbreviations that used two digits. According to that standard, NSW was NS. Unfortunately, since ISO charges six arms and three legs for a standard, businesses can sometimes run on stupid standards that are decades out of date.

My mother saw her return ticket was heading to Melbourne VI and assumed it meant gate 6 at Melbourne airport. It didn't. Fortunately there's no real significance to the return gate at Melbourne airport for an international flight, so it didn't affect me picking her up.

Because in the US, where the company was founded, the states have 2 letter abbreviations in common language. I wish people could use the ISO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:AU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:US

We had a chat about that on HN just the other day. It's cheaper to hack something together based on the world around you than it is to pay ISO a bucket of money to read one standard.

But it turns out most people have been doing it all wrong since forever. [0]

[0] https://www.iso.org/standard/73224.html

Canadian provinces and territories also use standard 2 letter abbreviations, which makes things work better with the US postal and addressing system. BC, AB, SK, MB, ON, QC, etc.

If you check the link you linked, you'll see that until 2004 the codes were indeed NS for NSW, VI for Vic, TS for Tas and QL for Qld. If you bought the standard for an arm and a leg in 2003, why would you buy the update for two arms and three legs in 2004? It's not like there's been any new states in Australia ever.

Interesting. I only first used these ISO labels around 2011, so the two letter versions for Australia never hit me. However, having grown up in NSW, i can attest that it’s never been a two letter abbreviation in common language. Likely the standard was mass produced and “corrected” for ambiguity later, that’s my guess anyway.

Wouldn't be surprised, a lot of older systems - and the airline industry has a lot of older systems - worked with really tight and compact constraints, for which I'm sure there was a technical reason at the time.

I mean if we ever get more than 17576 airports in the world, there will be a problem with the three-letter airport codes because every system built in the past 50 years will be using that.

Fixing, replacing or modernizing something like that becomes a feat of archeology. I mean the codebase I work in is from 2012 and it's already got a high rate of wtf/sec (the incompetence of my predecessor didn't help there)

> Wouldn't be surprised, a lot of older systems - and the airline industry has a lot of older systems - worked with really tight and compact constraints, for which I'm sure there was a technical reason at the time.

There was a story by a man named Amr whose name could never survive a trip through airline booking systems that encode the gender in the given name field: "SMITH/JOHNMR". His name would always come back as A.

https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/149323/my-name-ca...

My initials are J.R. In the US, when these are printed after my surname, a lot of people think I'm <surname> Junior.

There's a similar effect with the initials D R, M R or M S.

In Britain, including a dot after abbreviations is a bit dated — it's UK, USA, NASA, JG Smith Motors Ltd, Mr Jones etc. (American usage seems mixed; I sometimes see "USA" and "U.K." in the same sentence.)

That means "Dr Jones", "DR JONES" and "D R JONES" are particularly easy to confuse.

> Concur, everybody's favorite corporate flight booking engine

Ah yes

But the coincidence between NS and NSW is just way too unlucky

I'm happy I know a bit about booking codes and how airlines work to be able to look through the user interface for what might be wrong.

There’s like a daily flamewar on avherald. They even have a faq entry for this:

Q: Why do you use "wrong" abbreviations (e.g. for New South Wales)?

We use the original ISO 3166 standard (two letter code) to remain compatible with other sources. Therefore the abbreviation for e.g. New South Wales is NS unlike the postal abbreviation NSW.

New Mexico Magazine has a column every month where people tell their tales of people thinking that the U.S. state of New Mexico is in the nation of Mexico.

Things like insurance and credit card companies cancelling their accounts because they moved out of the country. Apparently it happens all the time.

Wait, so insurance and CC companies are the ones making the mistake?

Not too surprising. When I worked at the US Naval Research Laboratory someone submitted the paperwork for travel orders to attend a physics meeting in New Mexico, and it came back refused because he didn’t allow the required lead time for approval of foreign travel.

Do they think foreign countries have a ZIP+4 AND a +1 country code?

If they can't remember the names of 50 states, I wouldn't expect them to understand ZIP Codes.

And +1 covers at least one foreign country.

Canada doesn't use ZIP+4. Whatever, Breaking Bad should have put this problem to bed.

The independent countries of the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau use ZIP codes.

LOTS of foreign countries use the +1 phone numbering plan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Numbering_Plan#...

John Preston: Just recently, my auto insurance was canceled when I gave them notice that I was moving back to New Mexico. After inquiring why, they replied, “We don’t cover Mexico.”

https://www.newmexico.org/nmmagazine/articles/post/one-of-ou...

A colleague's husband had his credit card blocked by his English bank when he travelled from England to Northern Ireland.

He was hiking in an area with limited phone signal, so he phoned his wife (it was a joint account) and she tried to unblock it. The call centre employee said it was because of unexpected foreign travel.

It's easy to believe the call centre person is ignorant.

It's not so clear why the anti-fraud department of one of Britain's largest banks should think the same.

Here’s the archive of those articles:

https://www.newmexico.org/heart-of-nm/one-of-our-50-is-missi...

It is for this reason New Mexico license plates have “New Mexico, USA” on them. For those not aware, every state simply puts the name of the state on their license plate but New Mexico adds ‘USA’ to theirs. The only state that I believe does this.

I believe they started that in the late 1960's. Not all of the plates have USA on them. The standard yellow plates do, but the alternate "centennial" plates don't. Also, some of the specialty plates do and some don't.

In a rather unfortunate coincidence, Ohio started issuing yellow plates with red text to people with too many DUI convictions a decade or so back. You don't often see plates from NM in OH, but when you do, it's a bit confusing.

This seems... wrong? The driver is not the car and vice versa.

I think these cars usually have breathalyzer interlocks by that point. Some of my cousin's family members have had those plates.

Not only that, but such a thing is probably illegal in the USA [0]. Someone needs to take it all the way through to the SCOTUS, although being forced to wear a scarlet letter as a form of public shaming has been ruled on before, if I understand correctly.

[0] https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/constitution-check-is-sh...

FWIW I can’t recall seeing one of these plates in 10+ years.

I have seen them before, though. Part of my family is a little, uh, rough, and when someone would get these in the past we’d say “oh so and so got their party tags”.

So I’ve always remembered them as party tags... lol.

One of my dad's friends called them "party plates", and that was over 20 years ago.

https://thenewswheel.com/a-bit-about-ohios-scarlet-letter-pl...

Was looking through the comments and saw this. Glad I'm not alone in remembering these. We called them "party tags" instead of "party plates", though. I wonder how many people remember that being a thing in Ohio.

The column is called "One of Our Fifty is Missing." People report trying to fly from Florida to NM and being told they need a passport and have to talk to a supervisor with a map before they can get home, etc.

Can confirm, friend from New Mexico was in town. We were checking out and making small talk with the clerk. He said “your English is excellent.”

Ah, is that column still called “One of our fifty is missing”?

(Memories from the late 80s, when I spent a year in Albuquerque)

I think this says a lot about the overall level of education in the USA.

I was flying to Costa Rica from Montreal. Airline wanted money for checked luggage, but typically for long distance flights like this it's free. After enquiring, turns out I had bought the wrong flight to San Jose, California, instead of San Jose, Costa Rica. It's SJC vs SJO too, easy to confuse... Glad I figured that out before getting there!

San Jose, California has a nice technology museum, and a short commute to many silicon valley companies, but not much else going for it!

You do realize that San Jose is the biggest city in the Silicon Valley and there are tons of well known companies in San Jose.. :)

Really puts the Dione Warwick song into a new light.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_You_Know_the_Way_to_San_J...

It goes both ways. Once I was booking trip to San Jose. Flight was surprisingly expensive (but who cares, season variations and such. anyway it's work trip) but what gave me a pause, it's that cars were dirt cheep compared to usual. After poking around, turned out that I was booking trip to San Jose, Costa Rica instead of San Jose, California.

I've made this "mistake". It was just a layover, so it didn't matter much. But suddenly realizing we were going to Costa Rica and not CA was still fun.

Not as impressive, but there used to be two stations in Seoul's circular subway line 2, named Sinchon and Sincheon, on the opposite corner of Seoul. In older Romanization scheme it was worse: Shinch'on vs. Shinch'ŏn. (I guess it didn't help that they sound almost identical to an untrained English speaker.)

Sadly (for me), they renamed one station, so they aren't confusing any more. Boo.

I had this issue meeting up with a friend when I was visiting Tokyo, turns out Akebanebashi and Akebonobashi are similar sounding metro station names and can lead to a lot of confusion :-)

The NYC subway frequently has multiple stops with the same name, e.g. “23 St” (at Lexington Av, Broadway, 6 Av and 8th Av). That’s not always a big problem in Manhattan, because they’re relatively close. But it gets more interesting when you try to get to DeKalb (L) towards the extreme north end of Brooklyn, while DeKalb (BQR) in downtown Brooklyn is the one people know.

Philadelphia only has two subway lines but still has this problem because they run roughly parallel, about a mile and a half apart, for a bit. As a result both lines have stops called "Spring Garden" and "Girard" named after streets that intersect both lines.

"Newark Penn Station" comes one stop before "New York Penn Station" on the train from Newark Airport, a common port for visitors.

The Chicago “El” subway system has three stations named “Chicago”. None are in the downtown core. I always wonder about tourists hopping on the Blue line at O’Hare and where they end up.

Oh yeah, that reminds me of a bus line in Daejeon that had these three consecutive stops:

    West Daejeon Intersection Station (seo-daejeon-negeori-yeok)
    West Daejeon Intersection (seo-daejeon-negeori)
    West Daejeon Station Intersection (seo-daejeon-yeok-negeori)

...at least they should be within walking distance.

Reminds me of a minor subplot in a musical (very obscure, you probably haven't heard of it) that I was in as a teenager. Throughout the show, from time to time, the main characters (all high-schoolers) talk about an upcoming band trip to Peru. It's assumed that the trip will be to the country in South America. Then at the end, as part of a closing announcement, the vice principal of the school (the character I played) reveals that the trip is to Peru, Wisconsin.

Saint John, New Brunswick and St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador must confuse people too. I never remember which one is which without Googling it.

Am from Saint John. Every time I tell someone from away where I'm from, I make sure to tell them "The one without the 's'."

Ain't John?

There's also a St John, Virgin Islands.

And St. John’s Antigua

It's also one of Florida's most famous rivers, with the surrounding area going by the name.

Imagine dressing for the Virgin Islands and ending up in Labrador

St John, Indiana is about 35 miles SSE of Chicago.

I personally know several people who have made that exact mistake, ending up in not just the wrong city but the wrong province by travelling to St John's when they meant to go to Saint John or vice versa.

It's so easy to mix them up! Two cities, both in eastern Canada, in the only two provinces whose names start with New. To make it worse, both names translate to Saint-Jean in French.

Iran has ~300 cities, town, and villages named Mohammadabad. Add Aliabad, Hasanabad, Hoseynabad, and Dehnow to the mix, and I don't know how people can find anywhere on the map.

https://slate.com/technology/2014/05/longest-disambiguation-...

I attended a conference in St John's. Two of our plenary speakers ended up in New Brunswick. One missed their slot, the other was scheduled for day 2. This is a familiar problem, and the organizers PLASTERED the website with reminders to avoid NB.

I'm told that the second s in St John's stands for screech. (or, I just came up with that mnemonic on the spot. we may never know)

Mnemonic:

Newfoundland and Labrador = 2 entities => Saint John's

New Brunswick = 1 entity => Saint John

I’ve been down this route on a fairly large flight booking site a few years ago. The default result for Sydney was the Nova Scotia one

Took me a few seconds to realize the error

Several years ago I lived in La Paz, BCS, Mexico. A friend of mine worked in the Mail service in that city and told me they received A LOT of mail that was meant to be sent to La Paz, Bolivia.

Apparently in several cities the staff of the Slovakian and Slovenian embassies meet regularly to exchange wrongly addressed mail.

The problem is so acute because these two countries’ own names for themselves are even more similar than in English: Slovensko (Slovakia) and Slovenija (Slovenia).

Nowadays, several smaller European countries recommend prefixing the postcode with the ISO country code:

  Kúpeľná 1/A
  SK-811 02  Bratislava 1
  Slovakia

  Pošta Slovenije d.o.o.
  SI-2500 MARIBOR
  Slovenia

In fact, I see it's a general recommendation for international post: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_codes#On_the_us...

While others like the German post does recommend not use abbreviations, but full country names. As this discussion showed, there are plenty of possibilities to get abbreviations confused.

There's a small Sidney on Vancouver Island also:

http://vancouverisland.com/plan-your-trip/regions-and-towns/...

I actually spent some time in Sydney NSW some years ago, and stopped off in Victoria, BC to visit friends on the way there; it was kind of funny having to clarify where it was I was going because in that context they definitely assumed I was on the way to their local Sidney, population 11k, not the one on the other side of the Pacific.

They bought the wrong ticket, it can happen, I get it.

But they are going to literally the other side of the planet and never had a look to their tickets?

Never wondered why Canada is suddenly between Europe and Australia?

Not the smallest hint from the fact that they were not going to fly for longer than 10 hours?

Edit: even better: from Argentina to Australia... via Canada???

Grew up there and never heard of this! Hilarious! :)

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