Florida teen traveling to Cleveland boards wrong flight to Puerto Rico
For the second time in recent weeks, a child traveling alone by air wound up in the wrong destination.
A Florida teen on Dec. 22 was expected to arrive in Cleveland, Ohio, but mistakenly boarded a flight to Puerto Rico, according to TribLive news partner WTAE.
The 16-year-old boy left Tampa on a Frontier Airlines flight to meet his mother in Ohio but landed instead in San Juan, Frontier Director of Corporate Communications Jennifer de la Cruz said in a statement to CNN.
The Ohio and Puerto Rico flights departed from the same gate.
“Frontier has extended its sincere apologies to the family for the error,” de la Cruz said.
De la Cruz said in the teen “was immediately flown back to Tampa on the same aircraft and accommodated on a flight to Cleveland the following day.”
Frontier does not have an unaccompanied minor program to provide escorts for children but those 15 and older can fly alone.
The mix-up comes on the heels of a similar incident where a six-year-old flew alone on Spirit Airlines from Philadelphia to Orlando rather than his expected destination of Ft. Myers.
Tawnya Panizzi is a TribLive reporter. She joined the Trib in 1997. She can be reached at tpanizzi@triblive.com.
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