Do as I say, Not as I do

I would like to think I am beyond mistakes when booking flights since I do it frequently enough.  The truth is, I make far too many mistakes and when dealing with airlines it can be expensive.  Much more expensive than the new Mumford and Sons album I want.  I recently booked a trip on Expedia.com while in Canada and made a slight error on the return trip date.  I wanted to return on October 11.  The USofA is unique in that we write our dates Month/Day/Year.  Other countries change the order up.  So, while in Canada and being forced to use the Canadian Expedia site I mistakenly booked the return flight for November 10.

Always verify that you have the correct dates and locations when booking a flight yourself.  You should do this when using a travel agent, too.  They are far from mistake proof.  Boy are they!  I have a doozy of a blog topic about my travel agent using my personal credit card to pay for my boss' business trip.  Back on the topic for today, I got very impatient when booking this trip for several reasons:

1. Delta Airlines has a very poor user interface (UI) for booking flights on line when you want to book multiple city trips and are searching for a compromise between schedule and price
2. Expedia has a better UI for searching for the best value packages but making changes to try different options is challenging
3. I tried using multiple windows to compare prices between different scheduling options and both Delta and Expedia get cranky with you when you try this

After approximately 45 minutes of searching for the best schedule and price I thought I nailed it.  I had a reasonable schedule at a reasonable price.  I booked it as fast as I could, I thought if I waited a minute or two I would run over the arbitrary time period to book the flights before the website changed prices on me.  The ultimate reason I made the mistake was, I am used to making my flight arrangements in about 10 minutes and this took much longer and I got impatient.  My impatience cost an additional $317.60 for a one-way ticket on the correct date.  This is no fun to pay but the cost of changing the original flight was over $600!  Please take my advice and double check your dates, airports, times, destinations, and everything else.