“I knew I was in trouble when I saw a snowy mountain peak” – A man traveling to Sydney, Australia lands in Sidney, Montana

An American traveler was shocked to land for the trip of a lifetime – only to find he was in Sidney, Montana, not Sydney, Australia.

Ingsley Burnett, 62, from New York, made an unfortunate mistake booking his flights.

He managed to mix up the airport codes; Sydney, the famous capital of Oz in New South Wales, is called “SYD” while tiny Sydney in northwestern Montana is called “SDY”.

Mr Burnett only began to suspect that things had gone wrong when he looked out his plane window on approach.

“I saw a mountain peak covered with white snow. At that point I knew I was in trouble,” he told local news station KTVQ.

His flight landed in the town of Billings, Montana, from where he boarded a small plane for the connecting flight to Sydney.

“It’s a matter of acronyms,” Mr Burnett said of his mistake.

“The SYD versus SDY. Someone has to fix this.”

He also admitted he was pleasantly surprised at how cheap the flight was when he made the booking, but that didn’t set off any alarm bells at the time.

Mr Burnett ended up staying at the Boothill Inn while awaiting a return flight, where the manager said he wasn’t the first guest to mix up Sidney and Sydney.

“This is the second time we’ve had a guest trying to get to Sydney, Australia,” Shelli Mann claimed.

It’s also not the first time a passenger has ended up in the wrong place.

In March 2022, a British couple boarded a Ryanair plane from France back to Stansted Airport, only to realize just before landing they had taken the wrong flight.

In fact, they descended towards Madrid, some 800 miles from their home in Fulham, London.

On March 21, just before 3 p.m., they drove to the airport to catch their Ryanair flight and headed for what was sure to be the right gate.

They showed their tickets and got on without any problems, only during the flight they had a suspicion that something was wrong.

“An hour into our flight, Jesse said he thought he heard a flight attendant say Madrid, but we thought he dreamed it,” says Ms Mallia.

“We were amazed and so were the flight attendants,” says Ms. Mallia.

“We ended up coming home, but we still have no idea how it happened.

“It’s not like catching the wrong bus – we’ve literally ended up in another country!”