Mumsnet users share their holiday nightmares with Admiral Travel Insurance

[EllieMumsnet]

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We can all laugh about our nightmare holiday moments when we are back in the comfort of our own home, but at the time they can often seem like the end of the world! The team at Admiral Travel Insurance have asked us to find out what holiday nightmares, however big or small, made you wish you’d stayed at home at the time.

So what's the worst holiday mishap you’ve had to deal with? Did you have a suncream explosion in your suitcase? Or realise you didn’t actually book the hotel you thought you did? Perhaps you planned a beach holiday and it rained every day? Or you discovered the major mistake of not practising putting up your new tent before you went camping?

Whatever your holiday nightmare moment, please share it below and you will be entered into a prize draw to win a £300 voucher of your choice (from a list).

Thanks and good luck!

MNHQ

Standard Insight T&Cs apply

[sharond101]

I won a competition for a holiday to Hong Kong. When we got to the airport having driven 8 hours we were told the flight had left 3 hours before. We hadn't got the email with a change of flight since it was a competition. We lost 2 days of a 5 day trip waiting on another flight

[TheWizardofWas]

Pen ink explosion in suitcase drenched everything in dark blue liquid. The sports bag was ruined too. No insurance....lesson learnt.

[Highhorse1981]

Driving holiday around South Africa

We both left driving licenses on kitchen table on the UK.

[YesitsJacqueline]

I've literally just got back from a terrible Easter Break. We flew to Italy to visit family - I got sickness and diarrhoea on the first night , it did not stop raining - I mean literally not for 1 hour. And it was dark and over cast thunder and lightning , difficult to keep 4 year old ds amused
And poor ds got attacked by a dog- he is fine no injuries . We changed our tickets and came back early- never been so glad to be home !

[UpOnDown]

Forgetting to talc wetsuits before putting them on, so hard to get off.

[Gumbo]

Flying alone with DC to South Africa (something I'd done many times before) and not realising their new restrictions meant I had to have a sworn Affidavit from DH to allow DC to be brought into SA with just one parent. We live nowhere near the airport so missed our flight that day, had to pay a charge to get onto flights the following day (and the airline refused to book them for us in advance 'just in case...', so we had no idea if we'd actually get onto the flight). Spent the day getting to a solicitor to get the paperwork sorted before the next flight. Was a horrendously stressful experience.

[MrsFrTedCrilly]

Party of 8 all with campylobacter food poisoning in an all inclusive resort in paradise island...saw the inside of the room and then a 5am boat transfer back to the mainland on a catamaran...I have never been as ill

[DrCoconut]

Other than lots of rain the past two years we have never had any disasters. The rain was more of an inconvenience than anything else.

[Treaclespongeandcustard]

Booked a week in the canaries in a crappy hotel with the view that 'we will never be in' but then it rained the WHOLE time and we were stuck in a really horrid place.

[thanksamillion]

Drove for 8 hours to get to resort in Bulgaria (we were living elsewhere in Europe). I'd underestimated how many hotels there were in the resort and didn't have any instructions about where exactly ours was. After an hour driving around DH was on the verge of giving up and going home. Eventually I accosted a taxi driver and got him to drive ahead of us a lead us to the hotel. Good holiday (apart from ceiling falling in in the hotel lobby) until we got in the car to drive home and discovered that the battery was flat. This time we got a taxi driver to tow us round so we could start the car and then didn't dare stop until we were a long way on the way home.

[BlueTablecloth]

the time we went camping and my dh forgot the stopper for the airbed and we had to sleep on the very hard very cold ground

[sarat1]

Took a lovely weekend trip to Paris on Eurostar but left the return ticket in the foldaway chair back on the way there so had to buy another ticket to get home. A very expensive mistake!

[pinkflump]

Oh gosh, I left our passports in the hotel room when we checked out at Disneyland Paris. We could literally see the train terminal at Calais and had to turn round and drive the 3 hours back to the hotel and then 3 hours back to the train station with a 2 and 5 year old on board. I'm not sure my sister has even forgiven me yet...

[asuwere]

Luckily we've never had any major disasters, but worst issue we had was on a weekend away in a holiday park. We'd hired towels to save packing any but they weren't available on arrival- never got them till 24hrs later. Meant we couldn't go swimming or have showers which wasn't ideal! We did get a refund of the hire charge though!

[Mel0Dram4]

I was 15 and went on holiday with my foster family to Turkey. My foster sis and i necked a bottle of Malibu before leaving. We got to the airport and my passport was nowhere to be found. We had to watch our plane take off without us. I was in the bad books to say the least. We had to stay an extra 3 days with just a few pounds a say each as we had spent the last of our currency.
Getting back to the hotel my passport fell out of my book...oops!
I quite enjoyed the extra few days but was put off Malibu for life!

[Royalsteph]

My ex husband booked for us to go to Barcelona for our honeymoon on our first wedding anniversary. He had kept this as a surprise, but when we got to the airport the flight was delayed and then cancelled after four hours of waiting. He turned to me on the way out of the airport and said 'well we were going to go to Barcelona' he also didn't have travel insurance so lost the money and couldn't rebook. We never did go on honeymoon. I spent our first wedding anniversary sobbing my heart out on the way home.

[peronel]

I persuaded my family to go camping, which went well until the ex Army tent my DS slept in was found to leak badly! He emerged dripping wet in the morning, cursing and vowing never to go camping again.

[TaytoAllDay]

We went on holiday to California for two months, the first night we decided we would stay in a really cute hostel in Santa Monica before heading down to San Diego to break up the journey but also experience Santa Monica.
However, something happened where the wrong shuttle bus was sent for us & we ended up being taken to a dodgy hostel in Inglewood! Which is apparently "the hood" . We were way too tired to travel back to Santa Monica so reckoned we'd just stay as it's only one night, we then proceeded to go to the shop just around the corner to buy a snack and ended up with the guy in the shop trying to shuffle us up a lane to buy some weed apparently when we were trying to leave back to the hostel.
Safe to say we were totally freaked out & that was the first and last time I'll ever stay in a hostel!

[Theimpossiblegirl]

Camping with the DDs in the Mendips one Easter- it poured down! Everything was wet, there was no-where to get out of the rain and DD2 was constantly trying to get down to crawl. We ended up just getting in the car and going home, sending DH back for the tent and our stuff the next day.

[Misst83]

I will never forget the time we went on holiday as a family many years ago. My brother at the time was about 3 or 4 and wanted to take his toy gun on holiday with him. He had asked my mum and she had said no.
We got to the airport checked all our bags in and were waiting to board the flight when our names were called over the tannoy. We were taken into a room where they asked us why there was a gun in our suitcase and proceeded to show us the xray scan with a clear image of the a gun in there. My monkey of a brother had only snuck the toy in without us knowing!
Luckily it was before all the terror attacks and 9/11 so although embarrassing for us security took it fairly light heartedly. I think it may be very different if it happened today.

[Dazzalm]

Two spring to mind...first of all was our honeymoon to a very small Maldivian resort - where we had torrential rain for the entire 10 days we were there and almost came back divorced and the 2nd was a trip to Thailand where our return flight from Koh Samui to Bangkok broke down (fortunately before take off so we weren't actually on it!) and we had to wait for a new part to be flown from Bangkok.

You'd think an extra day on a tropical island would be a pleasant experience but not when you have spend 9 hours in a tiny airport, with no information, very little in the way of refreshments and no passports (they'd taken them all away to do some kind of paperwork). Even by 8am the next day and fortunately an extra night in a hotel no one seemed to be able to tell us what was happening but luckily travel insurance paid for us to book new flights to Bangkok where we managed to convince the airline to let us on the next flight.

[LadyPenelopeCantDance]

I once picked up someone else’s suitcase at security. I realised when I got to the hotel and couldn’t open the case as it had someone else’s lock on it. I spent the next two days with only the clothes I had travelled in and a $5 tshirt from the giftshop and with no toiletries until they managed to swap the cases back!

[LizTaylorsFabulousTurban]

Just reached the halfway point in a flight when I suddenly felt sick. No prior warning (even scoffed a burger in the departure lounge). By the time we landed 1.5 hours later I was so weak and dehydrated from D&V that I couldn't stand up. You don't want gastroenteritis halfway across the med.

My holiday was 5 nights, I ended up in an isolation room in the hospital with noro for 6 days (4 of those on a drip), with two extra nights to recuperate before I could get a flight home. Praise the lord for travel insurance!

[LorelaiVictoriaGilmore]

All ready to drive to our holiday in France, including 2 year old ds behaving beautifully even though it was 5:30am. Car wouldn't start. Missed the ferry while we waited for a jump start. Our car was jump started and we rebooked on the channel tunnel train as we drove towards it. All good until we tried to drive off the train and... the car wouldn't start. Thankfully a guy a few cars back had a jump start kit. We kept the engine running and pulled into a service station in Calais. Tearful ds was begging my horribly stressed dh to 'fix it, daddy!' Eventually we thought we worked out that the boot interior lights was being kept on by a suitcase and draining the battery. Argh! Dh was so paranoid about it happening again we drove all the way to the south of France with a suitcase on my lap, no air con and no radio while I made frantic phone calls to up our road side recovery package. Great holiday once we got there though!

[ButterflyOfFreedom]

Something had gone on in the toiletries bag - some sort of explosion as it and the rest of the bag full.of clothes etc were covered in shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, shower gel et al!!!!
Still not sure what happened or how or why!!! But it was messy!!!!!