Travel Nightmares

David J. Danto

Travel thoughts in my own, personal opinion

eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD on

Travel Nightmares – November 2025

I woke up this morning (a Saturday, as I write this) at 4:30 a.m., wide awake and unable to fall back asleep. It should have been the perfect morning to sleep in – no early flight, no commitments, no alarm. Just rest. Or so I thought.

My body chose this rare morning of freedom to stage a mutiny. The one day I didn’t have to rush to an airport, I found myself reliving one in my sleep. The irony, of course, is that it was the morning after Halloween – the one night of the year when everyone expects ghosts and goblins to haunt their dreams. But my nightmare wasn’t filled with monsters or vampires. My subconscious apparently knows me too well to waste time on that kind of nonsense.

I’d just had a dream that rattled me – not in a horror-movie way, but in a distinctly “real life traveler” way. Monsters, zombies, or medical emergencies don’t scare me nearly as much as airline shenanigans.

In the dream, I was at Newark Airport, boarding a flight that was supposed to connect in Chicago to some international destination I can’t even remember. As I approached the gate, my ticket wouldn’t scan. The agent looked at me and said flatly, “You’re no longer on this flight.”

When I checked my itinerary, I discovered United had rerouted me – to Philadelphia. Yes, Philadelphia, from which I was somehow meant to connect to Europe. Logic had clearly left the gate.

The actual impossibility of that itinerary wasn’t what bothered me. What really got under my skin was the idea that someone, somewhere, had changed my plans without asking and without telling me. I had barely an hour before the new flight, yet instead of sprinting past any airport obstacles to the new gate, I was searching for a customer service desk so I could lodge my protest – consequences be damned.

In my dream, those service counters looked like something out of a 1960s bank – tall glass partitions with tiny speaker slots and sliding trays for passing documents. It was all very Kafka meets TSA. My anger was so consuming that time, logic, and reason evaporated.

That’s when I woke up – heart racing, jaw clenched, still furious that someone at United (real or imagined) had dared to mess with my travel plans. Even after reassuring myself it was just a dream, the emotions lingered.

So here I sit, coffee and toast in front of me, the cat fed, and my laptop open, trying to unpack what that was all about.

Have I flown so much that a phantom misconnection is enough to spike my blood pressure? Or is it that years of airline indifference have conditioned me to expect betrayal at 35,000 feet – to the point that even my subconscious can’t let it go?

I don’t often have travel nightmares. In fact, I can’t recall another. But this one has stayed with me, which says something about how raw that nerve still is for frequent travelers – those of us who’ve been gaslit, delayed, downgraded, and stranded by our so-called “loyalty partners.”

What does it say about an industry when the mere thought of being mistreated by them feels more believable than any monster in a nightmare? Airlines have become the Freddy Kruegers of modern business – they haunt us even when we sleep.

Maybe now that I’ve written this out, it’s out of my system. I’ll try to grab another hour of sleep – at least until the next travel nightmare, real or imagined, taxis down the runway of my subconscious.

This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions.

All image and links provided above as reference under prevailing fair use statutes.

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