Travel today can be very challenging and every passenger or guest always wants the smoothest trip possible. Since there are many things out of ones control that can go wrong, you do not want to increase your odds of a snafu by making a basic mistake when reserving a room or especially an airplane ticket. With security regulations as they are, you cannot afford to have a problem an hour before your flight. Here are a couple mistakes recently made by others and their lessons may help you prevent a similar circumstance.

I have found some people are not even aware of what city or airport they are leaving from. Here in the Bay Area, you can enter the words San Francisco as your departure city on Expedia and their web site will offer you 4 options, including San Jose and Oakland. This is utterly senseless - if you enter Oakland, it gives you Oakland but enter SFO or San Francisco and you have to go through a separate step to actually GET San Francisco. So make sure if you reserve a flight in San Francisco that you are flying in or out of San Francisco and not San Jose or it may be too late to cancel when you discover your error.

Another common mistake is to look at a wrong calendar month and make your booking for a wrong date. Some people like to book by saying they are looking at the Friday at the end of the month and they have no idea they are looking at the wrong month because they are focused on the day and not the month. Going by the date can be a problem as well - if you say you are flying on the 20th, you then have 12 choices of months. Errors are not always caught when booking either so my advice is that it is VERY important that you actually verify the info when the airline sends you a confirmation or issues a ticket.

Lastly, you cannot interchange names, use aliases or nicknames or maiden names that do not match up with your ID. People have used their married name to reserve a flight but their passports are still under their maiden name and they are denied boarding. Others have been known to use a nickname like Jan for Janet and believe it or not, they have to buy a new ticket using the full name. This can not only delay you reaching your gate but it may cost you any discount you reserved by buying in advance because now you have to buy an instant ticket. In fact, the price of a walk up ticket may be hundreds higher than your confirmed fare. If you are lucky, it may only cost a $100 change fee IF the airline will agree to re-issue the ticket.

So make sure all your ducks are lined up in a row when you book your ticket or you may be bounced from the head of the security line to the back of the airline ticket counter line in an instant. And then your nightmare begins as you attempt to rectify a simple error and you find that nothing about travel is simple anymore.

David C. Reynolds is a longtime veteran of the Hotel business who offers common sense, money saving advice on how to find rooms, booking hotels as cheap as possible, travel and ground transportation tips, understanding reviews and occasional destination 'specials'. If you would like detailed information about reserving hotels as cheaply as possible, check out his e-book or MP3 at: http://www.cheaphotelforyou.com .
To get details about his 50+ page travel tips e-book, go to his site: http://www.cheaphotelforyou.com/TravelTips.htm