Be careful when you book tickets

Ticket booking is always a painful task. There were days when people had to walk to the reservation counter to book tickets. Even I have experienced the queueing activity. When I was schooling, my father used to book the tickets - be it a cinema theatre or a park ticket or a travel ticket. He always plans the trip well in advance.

If it is going to be an outing like theatre or park, it would be advance booking before 2 weeks. He planned it to avoid the queueing inconvenience eating up his time in idle. If it was the travel plan, then the tickets are booked 3 months advance. He booked it 3 months advance because the reservation system allows him to do only 3 months advance. To my knowledge until my college studies, he never stood up in a queue for reservation. TIll then we made outing once a year to visit our relations during the Summer vacation. So dates and plan was almost fixed and doesnt get affected.

When I worked in Bangalore, I travel to my hometown every alternate weekend and I started making the travel plans. As an ideal daughter for my father, I followed him by writing the reservation form and booked tickets well in advance rather a month before. I would have practiced it no later than for my first two travels. Then I was influenced by the world of computers.

I started booking my tickets online and utmost tried to avoid the reservation queue.Lazyness brewed in me and I advised my father to learn online booking. I stopped planning my travel instead travel when the tickets are available as and when I search them online.

I was pretty confident with my bookings be it a planned travel or an unplanned travel, I make up it up for the booked date. But one day the confidence turned over confidence. I had made online booking for a movie for sunday evening. Online ticketing is very simple, either u get a reference number or take a printout of the tkt and get it.

I booked the ticket for the movie and pulled in everyone at home and walked into the theatre with the printout. The gate keeping boy allowed us to inside and we got our seats comfortably and got settled with the popcorns munching. The manager of the theatre walked to us and asked for the tickets. He asked us to come out and checked our tickets. I wasnt sure y we were pulled out of the theatre. He informed us that the ticket printout which we had was dated for the saturday evening show and we turned up on sunday.

Even though educated, working and personally booked online, experienced with online ticket booking, a small mistake in the selection of date in computer. The system date was set from Monday to Sunday showing S for saturday and S for sunday leading up to the confusion. It was left unnoticed until We had watched the first 2 scenes of the movie and were sent back home.
One another scene which recently happened was while booking flight ticket for my father. After several discussions at home we finalised the date for his travel to be friday night flight. The flight was at 1.15am and the booking was made for friday 1.15am flight. Keeping the discussions in mind he prepared for his travel on friday night and at the airport his travel was denied saying his flight has already left and his travel status was NO SHOW as the 1.15am flight means it is saturday early morning flight but keeping in mind that it was a friday night flight the whole mess happened.

So BE AWARE or BE AWAKE when you book your tickets online. Dont go by word or say. Dont get mislead by the dates & timings. LOOK properly for the date and time of the booking made.