New Jersey woman arrives in Jamaica without a passport following mishap.
A woman who had booked a flight to Florida accidentally ended up 900 miles away in Jamaica without her passport after boarding the wrong plane.
Beverly Ellis-Hebard often flies between her two homes in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Jacksonville, Florida. As these are domestic flights, she does not need a passport to travel between the two cities.
“I fly once every six weeks. I picked Frontier flights because we flew so often,” she told WABC-TV. She had arrived at Philadelphia’s airport and checked in for her flight to Jacksonville.
She arrived at the departure gate for her routine flight and saw that the Frontier Airlines board read PHL to JAX.
After asking a Frontier agent if she had enough time to go to the restroom, Ellis-Hebard came back to her gate shortly after to find that the flight was almost fully boarded, she told the news station.
As Ellis-Hebard went to board, a staff member at the gate questioned the size of her bag, so she put it in the baggage sizer.
“I put it in and when I went to take it out my arm right here got all scrapped up. I was bleeding,” she said.
She added that the gate agent then rushed her to board.
“She said ‘come on, come on. Give me your boarding pass’. I would say I took about 10 steps, and she said ‘are you Beverly Ellis-Hebard?’. I said ‘you just had my boarding pass. You just checked me in. Yes’. She said ‘All right, go. Go’.”
While in the air, a flight attendant looked at Ellis-Hebard’s arm and told her she could relax once they made it to Jamaica, according to ABC 7.
“I laughed. I said ‘I would love to be going there but I have a beach where I live,'” Ellis-Hebard told the flight attendant, per the outlet. “She said, ‘Look at me. This plane is going to Jamaica.’ And I knew by the look on her face she wasn’t joking.”
“You’re entering a different country without a passport. That’s bad,” one of the flight crew members told Ellis-Hebard.
Upon arrival on the Caribbean island, Jamaican authorities allowed her to wait in the jetway until the next flight to Philadelphia.
A Frontier Airlines spokesperson said the company had apologised to Beverly and given her a refund.
The spokesperson said: “We sincerely regret that the customer was able to board the wrong flight and have extended our apologies.
“We have provided her with a refund and compensation as well as addressed the matter with airport personnel.”
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