Now, we know you always get, uhh, different treatment on a Ryanair flight but, when we arrived at Bari Airport in Italian region of Puglia fresh off our recent flight, this is not what we were expecting to find.

A heath checkpoint solely for Ryanair passengers? A health checkpoint sponsored by Ryanair? A sanity test for the unfortunates disembarking from O'Leary-jet?

We didn't dare ask, lest we be subjected to the health check. And since we were unfortunate enough to be flying with British Airways, we didn't get to test it out, either. Maybe next time.

At least there's something that made us happy to be flying BA.

[Photo: Jaunted]]]> juliab 2011-10-28T13:16:08-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2011/9/16/155059/048

Famed Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek tells us to be very suspicious of anti-smoking campaigns. Often what's at work has very little to do with improving individual and public health, and everything to do with just kind of making smokers miserable. Under this line of thinking people don't want to ban smoking because they're allergic to smoke or whatever - although some people undoubtedly are. What they're after is the thrill of denying smokers their fix. As non-smokers they don't enjoy nicotine in any way, so why should anyone else be allowed to?

Nonsense, you say? The people behind smoking bans are the most objective of public health professionals, driven purely by epidemiological data and not at all by an obnoxious busy-body urge to "protect the public" from anything they don't themselves personally like? Fair enough. But then please explain this travel health idiocy.]]> Omri 2011-09-16T15:50:59-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2011/8/9/10324/83197

A flight attendant career is glamorous! Or so I thought! I admit, I signed up for the glamour eighteen years ago, but I quickly learned that most of the glamor was gone from this industry. I was on my second trip as a new hire flight attendant, my uniform was crisp, my hair was pulled back in a perfect french twist to match my beautiful french manicure, and I had all the right accessories.

This particular day I was the aisle flight attendant when a passenger asked me if I would heat up a baby bottle. I knew just what to do! Now all I needed was a sick bag so I could fill it with hot water. I reached into a seat back pocket, grabbed a sick bag and pushed my hand inside to open it up. Feeling the still warm, oatmeal consistency on my hand is where the glamor ended for me. Yes folks, I had just stuck my manicured hands into fresh vomit!

You've heard about the gross things people do on airplanes. There's classics like cutting toenails, walking barefoot around the plane, changing a baby diaper on the tray table...I could go on. I hate to admit it, but these are all behaviors I see or experience as a flight attendant every time I go to work.

I recently asked some co-workers to share the grossest things they have seen throughout the years as well. Warning, the answers even shocked me! Fasten your seat belts for...

The Top Ten Gross Things Flight Attendants Have Seen Passengers Do on Airplanes: ]]> Sara Keagle 2011-08-09T13:00:16-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2011/8/2/135237/1955

We're thinking of starting an ongoing series about bad travel "studies." Last time it was the report about how cell phones can bring down airplanes, a conclusion that the authors reached after copying down several anecdotes describing things that made no sense. A few flight attendants insisted that one time there were problems on their flight, and then they made someone turn off an iPhone, and then the problems totally went away—and then someone published a report about it. Because why not?

Today's entry comes from the International Headache Congress, which sounds like something out of The Onion but is actually an academic (?) conference co-sponsored by the International Headache Society and the American Headache Society. Researchers announced that they've discovered "distinct form of headache" that you can only get during the last few minutes of a flight before your airplane lands.]]> Omri 2011-08-02T15:30:01-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2011/2/28/04010/5134

This week hasn't started off on the right foot at all for some airlines, with tales of measles in airports and bed bugs on British Airways. Unfortunately being assigned a bed bug-ridden seat on a flight isn't something you can actively prevent happening, but contracting sicknesses at the airport? There are ways to avoid that, and they're simple as pie.

We've surely weirded you out with tales of the The Top 10 Gross Things People Do on Airplanes and even more gross stuff people do on airplanes, but hold tight for a moment. The key to staying healthy while in transit is mostly about being aware and speaking up when you need to (like if someone tries to rest their bare foot on your airplane seat's armrest, especially after they've returned from the lavatory). ]]> JetSetCD 2011-02-28T17:17:46-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2011/2/28/91429/2331

This post is brought to you by the phrases "locked in an airplane cabin" and "blood-sucking insects," and by the number 2, two being the number of different long haul British Airways flights that Yahoo executive Zane Selkirk discovered where bedbugs were devouring her body. To make things even more perfect, BA's flight attendants and customer service reps treated Ms. Selkirk horribly throughout and after her flights from Los Angeles to Heathrow to Bangalore. She's helpfully set up a website called BA Bites! to describe the experience.

We don't want to get into too many details, on account of how thinking about this nightmare kind of makes us throw up in our mouths. It suffices to say that at various points during her in-flight journey Selkirk observed: live bugs clinging to her blood-stained shirt next to their dead crushed friends on her shoulder, multiple generations of bugs crawling around and infesting the headrest and seat, and over 90 bites covering her body. The flight attendant on her first flight responded to the earliest of these episodes by angrily demanding "why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?" Because that's obviously what the problem was.]]> Omri 2011-02-28T12:01:33-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2011/2/21/173142/844

With President Obama working to lessen Cuba Travel restrictions, the island risks getting caught up in a hurricane of clichés. Thinking travelers aren’t generally fooled by the shiny veneer of places plugged in a Lonely Planet, but don’t discard Cuba’s clichés. They’re what make this intriguing country so exotic, so vibrant and so darned colorful. A Jaunted special secret correspondent discovers the best of each, all this week.

The only people I saw tangoing in Argentina were tourists and, in the years I lived there, the only people I saw eating frogs’ legs in France were British schoolchildren. So I learned to distrust clichés and genuinely expected that the only people puffing cigars in Cuba would be foreigners.

It took three seconds in Havana’s arrivals terminal to learn that I was wrong; the tobacco smell hung heavy in the air like great thunderclouds. Smoking is banned inside the airport; this was coming from people’s clothes and breaths. Until recently, the Cuban government heavily subsidized cigars and cigarettes for people born before 1956. Read into that what you will. Suffice to say that smoking-related diseases kill around 6,000 people each year in Cuba. Castro himself doesn’t figure in that number, having given up smoking for health reasons in 1985. ]]> femmefatale 2011-02-22T10:45:45-05:00 Search Jaunted string http://www.jaunted.com/search/