She bought an airplane ticket she thought was a scam. Then her future husband was on board

15.09.2023 - 16:55 / edition.cnn.com

The flight seemed too good to be true.

When Martina Jones got the text with the details, she scrutinized them for several minutes.

It was a $279 round-trip flight departing from either Washington D.C. or New York City, flying to Nairobi, Kenya.

“Of course, this was a great deal, I wanted to take advantage of it,” Martina tells CNN Travel today.

“But it was also very weird, I thought it might be a scam.”

It was November 2014, the day after Martina’s 29th birthday. The flight was scheduled for the following March. After weighing up the options and doing some research, Martina decided to bite the bullet and buy the ticket. Then she sent the deal round her various group chats, encouraging more of her friends to sign up.

Martina fell in love with travel during her stint studying abroad in London. After graduating college, she taught English in South Korea and then backpacked around Southeast Asia.

“I’m a traveler, through and through,” says Martina. “It gives me life.”

In 2014, several years into her New Jersey-based sales job, Martina was feeling a little disillusioned and bored by work. But she kept herself motivated by counting down the days until her next trip.

Across the Hudson River in New York City, Leslie Johnson, 33, also received a text from a friend with the Nairobi flight details.

Like Martina, Leslie was skeptical – the price seemed too good to be true. And to get the deal, you had to follow a series of random links – it really did seem like a potential con.

But the friend who’d forwarded the deal to Leslie was a seasoned flyer. They’d found the details via a travel group for Black travelers. Leslie – who “traveled a bit here and there, but not too crazy, just enough to get one or two passport stamps a year” – trusted their judgment, so decided to go for it.

His confirmation email didn’t arrive for a couple days. Leslie spent that waiting period still slightly convinced he’d been scammed.

Finally, the details came through.

“Then I knew it was good,” Leslie recalls.

March rolled around. The first leg of the flight, from the US to Amsterdam, was uneventful. In Amsterdam, Martina attempted to amend her booking so she could sit with her friends – she was traveling with five others and they were all at the back of the plane, while she was sitting on her own at the front.

The gate agent advised Martina to ask her fellow passengers if they’d mind moving. But when Martina asked, no one would budge, so she settled down to her textbooks instead – Martina was studying for the GMAT, a business school admissions test, and figured she could use the long flight time to get in some study.

By chance, Leslie was also separated from his friend on this leg of the flight. And by