Airline Flies Guy to Goiania, Not Guyana, in Embarrassing Fail

Remember when a British Airways typo sent a couple to Grenada, a country in the Caribbean, instead of Granada, a city in the south of Spain? Well, it happened again, except another airline's at fault, and this time, it was an African exchange student who ended up thousands of miles away from his intended destination.

Emmanuel Aknomanyi, a student from Ghana, believed he was on the way to Guyana -- as in the tiny South American nation along the Caribbean coast -- to attend medical school. But he was surprised when he exited his airplane and found himself in Goiânia, a city in Brazil that's a whopping 1,864mi away from Guyana.

Aknomanyi, a scholarship student, couldn’t get a non-stop flight from Ghana to Guyana, so he instead traveled to Sao Paulo, Brazil, to take a connecting flight he thought was bound for Georgetown, Guyana. And of course, after the 1.5-hour flight -- instead of the 11.5 hours the correct route he should have taken -- he landed in the entirely wrong place.

Aknomanyi waited in Brazil for a week, staying with strangers, before the airline kindly arranged to send him to his intended destination.

As one CNN anchor quipped, let’s just hope “his hand-eye coordination is better than his sense of direction.”

Ghana, Guyana, Goiânia. It's like the opposite of Tony! Toni! Toné! -- and with way fewer smooth tunes.


Chloe Pantazi is an editorial assistant on Thrillist's travel team. Yes, that's a British accent. No, she doesn't watch Doctor Who. Follow her on Twitter at @ChloePantazi.