After two flights had carried her halfway around the world, Samantha Lazzaris began to suspect that she was in the wrong place only when she spoke to an airport taxi driver.

She had planned a holiday in Costa Rica: hiking in the cloud-forests of that lush volcano-mottled strip of Central America, yoga and meditation on a tropical beach and some voluntary work helping the indigenous Borouca people to build a new village.

She booked her flights with Thomas Cook and chose an hotel in San José. Unfortunately for Miss Lazzaris the flight booking code for the airport in San José, Costa Rica, is SJO, only a letter away from that of the main airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico, SJU.

The two destinations appear very similar on ticket booking forms. They sometimes sound alike too: the main San José airport is called Juan Santa Maria, sometimes confused for San Juan. It is easier to tell them apart when one is standing outside San Juan airport in Puerto Rico, talking to a taxi driver.

Miss Lazzaris asked the taxi driver to take her to her hotel, giving him an address in San José, Costa Rica. “He looked in amazement, speechless,” she said. “Then [he] laughed and said, ‘This is not Costa Rica. It’s Puerto Rico’.”

This explained the posters in the airport. “I didn’t believe him,” she said. “I was in shock. I looked around the airport, saw posters of Puerto Rico everywhere, and thought, what am I going to do? Where is Puerto Rico? Where am I?”

Puerto Rico is a small island east of the Dominican Republic, where the Caribbean meets the Atlantic, a mass tourism destination and a commonwealth of the United States. The cloud-capped forests, the yoga retreat, the proposed site of the new Borouca village and indeed her hotel all lay a thousand miles away on the far side of the Caribbean, beyond the reach of even the most willing taxi driver.

It seems that the travel agent in the Bristol branch of Thomas Cook had entered the wrong code. Asked if this happened a lot, a rather tight-lipped spokesman for Thomas Cook told The Times that such mistakes occurred “very rarely”.

To get to her hotel, Miss Lazzaris had to fly to Miami, arriving at the airport at 11.30pm, and spend a sleepless night there before getting through to a representative from Thomas Cook at 6am local time the next morning.

She told the Bristol Evening Post: “I was told I signed the terms and conditions of the legally binding contract for the itinerary and therefore was accepting them. I had trusted Thomas Cook had ensured San Juan was the name of the airport near San José in Costa Rica, which is why I never questioned it.”

The therapist, 33, from Bristol, said that she had been to the travel agent several times, mentioning her assumption that she was booking flights for Costa Rica on each occasion.

Thomas Cook said that it was still investigating the claim, though last night Miss Lazzaris said that the travel agent had agreed to compensate her.

Other travel agents noted that San José and San Juan were two of a number of destinations sometimes confused in booking offices. Laura Rendell-Dunn, of Journey Latin America, told The Times that tourists hoping to visit San José in Costa Rica had found themselves instead in San José, California, and had to ask the way to San José while already in San José.

“Often people confuse La Paz, Bolivia, with La Paz, Mexico,” she said. Equally unfortunate are the mistakes that have led tourists hoping to see Santiago in Chile to book tickets for San Diego, the city in southern California, thousands of miles to the north.

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