Maintenance fixes the issue as it resets what you were doing in limbo. Characters can't be in travel, that is why they turn travel off 30 minutes prior to maintenance and after.

You could try making a Free Trial account, create the same character, use a different name, but put it on the same Home World as the character that got stuck, then attempt to travel and return, see if it does it to that account. If you can trigger it on a different account, then it could be a bug when certain conditions are met.