An Australian tourist has issued an important warning to her fellow travelers after a little-known $50 mistake left her stranded at a European airport for weeks.

Australian Tiah Slattery paid over $570 for her Ryanair flight from Tirana airport in Albania on Monday, but because the flight was overbooked, she was stranded along with 10 other passengers. While travel expert Quentin Long told Yahoo News that overbooking flights was “standard practice,” Slattery explained that the group was told they could have probably avoided their fate if they had done just one thing.

“I have one piece of advice if you’re traveling around Europe this summer: pay for a seat… it’s the only way to secure a seat on the plane if it’s overbooked,” she explained on social media.

Airlines don’t give a damn about overbooking

In Tiah’s case, travelers were told they would have to wait until the next flight, which was scheduled for 30 days. Tiah then wished she had paid the extra fee, which was less than $50. It appears that she has since arrived at her destination, but she was completely shocked that the airline could overbook so many passengers, claiming that airport staff said this was a recurring problem with several airlines.

Long told Yahoo News that “dismissing passengers” after overbooking is common practice across all airlines, and low-cost carriers are particularly notorious for it.

“They force the people with the cheapest fares to transfer first and obviously there’s not much you can do about it… they don’t give a damn,” he said. “In some rare cases, cargo is more important than passengers.”

Long has confirmed that purchasing a seat at an additional cost is indeed the “most logical” course of action to minimize the risk of being denied a flight.

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