Airlines, ride-share drivers, and customer service agents in the Washington D.C. area have long been familiar with a particular kind of panicked passenger: the one who arrives at the wrong airport. Dulles International Airport (IAD) recently poked fun at this common mistake on social media, but for many travelers, the mix-up between IAD, Reagan National (DCA), and Baltimore-Washington International (BWI) is no laughing matter.
On Friday, Dulles wrote, “Just an airport, standing in front of its passengers, asking them to double check which airport they are flying out of.” While hard numbers on how many travelers make this specific mistake are not readily available, travel industry professionals confirm it happens frequently. The problem is a perfect storm of factors. All three airports serve the greater D.C. metropolitan area, but they are geographically distinct, with IAD being in Virginia, DCA right across the Potomac River from DC, and BWI being in Maryland.
A lapse in attention when booking a flight or entering a destination into a GPS can easily send a traveler on a potentially hour-long journey to the wrong terminal, often without enough time to correct the error. The three-letter airport codes (IAD, DCA, BWI) are not intuitively related, but the names themselves, Dulles, Reagan Washington National, and Baltimore-Washington International, can be a source of confusion, especially for travelers who are not familiar with the region…