Milan Schipper told the CBC that he bought his flight because it was much cheaper than all the other tickets.
Instead of heading straight to the beach, as he had planned, he found himself in near-blizzard conditions with nothing more than a light jacket.
Airline employees helped him book a return ticket home to Amsterdam.
The 18-year-old says he knew something was amiss when he had a layover in Toronto, and his connecting flight was in a small Air Canada plane.
"The plane was really small and so I figured, would that make it to Australia?" he told the CBC.
It's not the first time hapless travellers have made that mistake.
In 2002, a young British couple also landed in the Sydney more famous for its lobster boats than its opera house.
In 2009, the Daily Mail reported that a Dutch grandfather travelling with his son also wound up there by accident.  Italian tourists made a similar error in 2010.
Once Mr Schipper landed, airline employees helped him book a ticket back to Toronto, so that he could return to the Netherlands.
His father, he told the CBC, "laughed an awful lot" when he picked Mr Schipper up at the airport in Amsterdam.
A Dutch student learned the hard way that some deals are too good to be true when he landed in Sydney, Canada instead of Sydney, Australia.