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Man plans trip to Sydney, Australia — ends up in Sidney, Montana

It was a tale of two Sydneys.

A New York man’s dreams of an idyllic Australian getaway crashed and burned spectacularly after a gross misunderstanding resulted in him flying to Montana instead.

“I saw mountain top covered in white snow…At that point, I knew I was in trouble,” Kingsley Burnett, 62, told KTVQ of the epic travel gaffe.

The New Yorker had reportedly planned on flying to Australia, where he was slated to take a cruise departing from the warm Aussie metropolis of Sydney.

He realized things had gone horribly awry when he landed in Billings and saw snow and a small Cape Air Jet waiting to fly him to Sidney, Montana.

For reference, Sidney boasts only just over 6,000 people while Sydney’s population clocks in at over 5.3. million.

Burnett said he’d reportedly gotten confused by the airport codes while booking the flight.

Kingsley Burnett, 62, had planned to take a cruise departing from Sydney, Australia.
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Kingsley Burnett with Carol Castellano, the American Airlines agent who helped him following the flight mixup.
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“It’s a matter of acronyms. The S-Y-D as opposed to S-D-Y. Somebody has to fix that,” he insisted, referring to Sydney and Sidney’s respective abbreviations.

It might seem odd that the traveler wasn’t tipped off by the massive price differential. However, Burnett, who was trying to be frugal with his vacation planning, said he’d just been happy to find such a “bargain” for a transoceanic flight.

With no plans to visit Sydney’s stateside doppelganger, Burnett visited the American Airlines ticket desk in Billings, where an agent named Carol Castellano helped sort out his flight fiasco.

“Kingsley came, and he goes, ‘I’ve got a problem,’” described Castellano, who, upon learning of his plight, realized the New Yorker wouldn’t have time to catch his Australian cruise.

An overhead shot of Sydney, Australia.
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Kingsley, who had planned to travel cheap, was ecstatic after finding what he thought was a great bargain on a transoceanic flight.
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So she booked the wayward fellow a return flight to NY as well as a room at the Boothill Inn where he could spend the night. Interestingly, this wasn’t the first time that manager Shelli Mann had observed such a mixup.

“This is the second time we’ve had a guest that was trying to get to Sydney, Australia,” she said.

Despite accidentally flying to the wrong hemisphere, Burnett says he’s just grateful that Castellano was able to help him out.

“Montana didn’t have kangaroos. It had Carol. And that was good enough for me,” he gushed, noting he rescheduled his Australian trip for June.

Burnett’s not the first person to fly to the wrong Sydney. In 2017, 18-year-old Milan Schipper of Vaassen, Holland, prompted facepalms around the globe after accidentally traveling to Sydney, Nova Scotia instead of the intended Australian destination.

Kingsley said he realized something was awry after looking out his window and seeing a "mountaintop covered in snow."
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Humans aren’t the only passengers who’ve accidentally ended up on the incorrect continent.

In December, a Tennessee family was flabbergasted an airline mistakenly sent their Nashville-bound dog halfway across the world to Saudi Arabia.