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When we decided we wouldn’t get married, we figured we still deserved a honeymoon, so we began making arrangements. We settled on a 4-week journey to Australia and New Zealand with a stopover in Beijing on the way down under. We thought, in our innocence, that perhaps someone at the counter would ask us whether that was our honeymoon and bump us up to business class. And when the day finally arrived, when we were standing in line at the check-in counter and our turn finally came, there was indeed a question. No, they did not ask us about the trip or what it meant to us; they couldn't care less about that or the fact that we had been saving money for this journey for the past 24 months and making plans for the past 12. No, what they asked instead was: - Do you have a Chinese Visa? Which kind of surprised us, but was met with our explanation of how we didn't require one since we had Visas and flights to Australia less than 72 hours after we landed and, as such, the Visa exemption applied to us. - No, you need a Chinese Visa. I'll spare you the following two and a half hours of confusion, anger, and despair, as we were repeatedly denied boarding by someone who bragged that they had been working there for the past 12 years, and as we desperately tried to change our flight before it departed and we got flagged as "no-show". I'll spare you the humiliation of being told, several times, that this sort of thing kept happening because people just didn't pay enough attention to details. I'll spare you the crying and the sobbing when we realized that our credit cards weren't able to afford the new fares, and the shouting over the telephone when a relative called with a credit card number they could lend us and we were finally able to change our flight with just 10 minutes to spare. We would depart three days later, and we wouldn't go to Beijing. The next day we went to the Chinese Embassy, where the story instilled chills and looks of terror over their staff, who kept asking: - They did what? The only thing worse than the refusal to let us board was the ensuing attempt by the airline to cover up what they had done by claiming that they had determined that our flight had been overbooked and by offering us a standard 600€ voucher for the fact that we had been transferred to a different flight... ...when we hadn't. Long story short, I can assure you that the last thing I expected from our vacation was to end it by suing the airline.