Spent 3 hours in a Lisbon hostel trying to book a $19 bus to Porto
I thought I found a cheap FlixBus ticket from Lisbon to Porto for 19 euros last Tuesday. Turns out their site kept rejecting my US debit card and the hostel wifi dropped every ten minutes, so I was stuck at the front desk way past midnight. The guy working there finally showed me the Rede Expressos app, which took him 4 minutes and cost 16 euros. Why do these budget bus sites make it so hard to just pay for a ticket?
Back in 2018 I watched a German guy at a hostel in Krakow spend 45 minutes fighting with a Ryanair booking page while his phone battery slowly died. The girl at reception finally just pulled out her own laptop and had him sorted in five minutes flat. Sometimes the fix is simply a local who knows which sites actually work.