Jaunted

Travel Snapshot / Travel Health / BRI / Ryanair / Italy Travel / Puglia Travel / → All Tags

The Special Ryanair Welcome at Bari Airport

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]

Travel Health / Rants / Travel Hell / Smoking / Cigarettes / → All Tags

E-Cigarettes on Airplanes: The Newest Big Debate

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.

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Travel Health / Lists / In-Flight Comfort / Bad Ideas / Airplanes / Flight Attendants / Sara Keagle / Heatlhy Travel / Health Travel / → All Tags

The Top Ten Gross Things Flight Attendants Have Seen Passengers Do on Airplanes

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:

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Can Airplane Landings Give You Headaches? Science Investigates!

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.

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Basic Lessons from Elementary School Can Keep You Healthy at the Airport

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).

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Scary Bugs / Travel Health / British Airways / Airplanes / Dirty Travel / Bed Bugs / Airline News / → All Tags

Grosser Than Gross: Woman Attacked by Bedbugs on British Airways Flights

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.

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Cuba Field Trip / Cuba Travel / Communism Travel / Travel Health / → All Tags

Appreciating Cuba's Clichés: Cigars are Nothing to Be Sniffed At

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.

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Celeb Travel / Travel Health / George Clooney / Justin Bieber / → All Tags

Even George Clooney Can't Avoid Malaria While Traveling

Celebs may be able to fly in private jets and stay at the best hotels, but that doesn't mean they're immune to travel-related illnesses.

According to The L.A. Times, even George Clooney is susceptible. Apparently, George has recently recovered from malaria, which he contracted while on a philanthropic trip to Sudan earlier this month.

But George isn't the only celeb who has fallen ill after traveling. During the swine flu epidemic of '09, several stars were taken down by the illness, including Rupert Grint (Harry Potter's Ron Weasley) who got sick after traveling.

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Smoking Bans / Travel Health / Worldwide-Smoking-Bans-Map / Spain Travel / → All Tags

The New Year Brings a Smoking Ban to Spain

Warning to smokers: Don't light up in public places when traveling through Spain anymore. Yesterday the country enacted a ban on smoking in enclosed public spots, including restaurants and bars. So you won't get a chance to partake in the old smoky tapas bar tradition during your visit.

If you get caught puffing away, it will cost you; a first-time offense carries a $40 fine, and repeat offenders will have to cough up as much as $134,000 after the third strike. However, enclosed spots aren't the only places where where your pack of cigs and lighter are prohibited. You also can get slapped with a fine for smoking in some outdoor areas as well, including playgrounds and near hospitals.

This is a big change for the formerly haze-filled country, which was one of the few last remaining Western European nations to allow smoking in public places. Plus, according to the Christian Science Monitor, government officials estimate that 35 percent of residents above 16 are regular smokers.

[Photo: xornalcerto]

Travel Health / WestJet / Airline News / Airlines / → All Tags

WestJet is Ready and Willing to Jab You in the Thigh with an Epi-Pen

People die on flights all the time. In fact, it just happened today. Thankfully, the passengers deaths are usually due to natural causes or a heart attack or other condition, and not because of a tragic crash. Still, you don't want to be a number with that fate, and so Canadian carrier WestJet is taking extra precautions for your health.

By the end of spring 2011, WestJet will have the newest design of Epi-Pens in all flight first aid boxes, just in case a passenger suffers a severe allergic reaction at 35,000 feet.

This is good news, and pretty easy extra little endeavor for WestJet to undertake, we'd bet. However, there's still no word on what airlines are doing to assist the great number of travelers who are deathly allergic to economy class.

[Photo: gTarded]

Scary Bugs / Travel Health / United Nations / New York City / → All Tags

An Infested United Nations Can't Bring Peace in New York City's War on Bedbugs

Bedbugs Okay, we know you don't want to think about them, but if you're either traveling to New York City soon or you're sleeping in hostels or cheapy motels anywhere in the world, you've got to at least be aware of the threat of them, and the minor measures you can take to safeguard yourself. Like checking for them would be a good idea. Just lift up the hotel/hostel pillows and the edge of the mattress; it's simple but it could save you.

We bet the United Nations wish it were so easy; the massive, iconic UN offices building on the east side of Manhattan recently came clean that they've been dealing with an infestation on almost every floor since early last year. Grossss.

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Celeb Travel / Kal Penn / Twitter / Travel Health / Airplane Hell / → All Tags

Kal Penn Tweets One of the Grossest Things He's Seen on an Airplane

Kal Penn, best known as Kumar in the Harold and Kumar movies, has been stomping for the Dems this week, but its what happened on his flight home this morning that made us take notice.

Earlier today, Kal Tweeted, "Whoa. Dude next to me on the plane vomited into the air sickness bag, folded it up, & put it back in the seat pocket like nothing happened."

Whoa is right! Kal should definitely add this story to our Top Ten Gross Things People Do On Planes thread since its one of the grossest stories we've heard, and we've heard a lot of them!

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