The other day, I was half-watching a subtitled, muted newscast and caught a bit of a travel story through the daze induced by my feet rhythmically pounding on a treadmill.

Here’s the gist: a university student in Ontario has a trip planned to Europe with his friends. The day of their departure, the friends head to Pearson International Airport in Toronto, and one by one they check in to their flight to Amsterdam and one by one their bags are checked and they’re ready to go — until it gets to this “unlucky” guy.

He is turned away by the ticket agent and he isn’t allowed to board the plane because his passport isn’t valid for at least three months after he plans to leave Europe.

The guy tells the reporter interviewing him he feels he should’ve been told about this requirement when he booked his ticket to Amsterdam.

Well, it turns out it’s nobody’s job to tell him that. Presumably, he had some idea of what he would do, where he would go, and other vitals prepared for his upcoming trip, but quite simply, he failed to read up on entry requirements.

The website travel.gc.ca has entry and exit requirements for dozens of countries listed. With a few clicks of a mouse, that information can be yours.

Unfortunately, he’s not the only traveller to ever be told they’re not about to take off as planned because of entry requirements for passport validity terms, and he certainly won’t be the last. In fact, one of my sisters’ friends did the same thing and had to delay her trip to Greece.

The thing is, even if you’re with a group, if you’re planning on travelling around Europe, you should probably have done some research yourself. It does seem weird to have to have a passport valid for that long, but — I hate to say it — better safe than sorry. For example, if you book your trip in January but you don’t depart from Canada for some far-away land until March, then you don’t return to Canada until August, you could need a valid passport until at least November, or maybe later, depending on the country’s requirements.

My sympathies for the “nobody told me” excuse are limited.

There are many travel goofs a person can make, up to and including getting on a plane to the wrong destination.

A relative of one of my friends in Winnipeg tried to go to sunny Daytona Beach, Florida during one winter many years ago. Imagine his disappointment when he arrived in Dayton, Ohio.

Some people even end up on the wrong continent entirely.

In the summer of 2009, a pair of Dutch travellers mistakenly ended up in Sydney, Nova Scotia instead of Sydney, Australia. The grandfather and grandson had booked their flight through a travel agent and, not speaking much English, ended up 17,000 miles away from their intended destination.

In fact, the Australia-Nova Scotia swap is surprisingly common. In 2002, a young British couple did the same thing, while an Argentinian woman did the same thing at the end of that year. She actually decided to forego her vacation during Australia’s summer for a December vacation to Cape Breton after befriending a local woman. What a trooper.

I suppose there’s a bit of an untapped tourism market in Sydney, Nova Scotia for mixed-up travellers.

In May 2013, a couple was flying from Los Angeles to Dakar, Senegal — or so they thought. They had booked their tickets to the capital of the West African nation online and were connecting through Instanbul, Turkey. The tickets all said DAC, which didn’t catch their eye at all.

However, after they got on their connecting flight in Turkey, they noticed something was wrong when a map of the flight path showed the aircraft heading over the Middle East. They landed in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

It appeared to be the airline’s fault that all their tickets were actually for Dhaka rather than Dakar, and the couple can’t be blamed for trusting the airline to fly them to the right destination.

People make mistakes when they book for themselves without the help of a travel or airline agent, and it’s surprisingly common. Travellers book online, probably don’t look at their confirmation emails or travel itineraries for weeks (I know I don’t), then when their travel days arrive they basically zone out and assume that everything has been booked correctly and everything is tickety-boo. While they’re travelling, they don’t think to check and recheck this stuff, and in countries where they don’t speak the dominant language, they go along with the shuffle. In my experience, ticket agents don’t exactly scrutinize boarding passes either.

It’s only when they’re mid-air that they get that little inkling that something isn’t right. Imagine having that sinking feeling while you’re 30,000 feet in the air.

Maybe that deal to England was too good to be true, you think as you scan the skyline looking for Tower Bridge only to realize you’re in London, Ontario. Or London, Kentucky or London, Ohio or London, Arkansas.

It’s good travel practice to check your itinerary and booking to make sure they’re right, and then double-check.

Then maybe triple and quadruple-check, just for good measure.

It may seem pretty obvious, but consider all the people out there who’ve learned this lesson the hard way.

At least they’ve got good stories to tell about their trips, even if they didn’t take the trips they’d intended.