Tag: Travel Hell

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The Stupidest Rental Car Story You May Hear This Year

January 30, 2012 at 12:31 PM | by | Comments (0)


This is not her car, but still WTF

We often wonder if one week will ever pass in which there’s just not some totally obscure travel story. This week isn’t going to be it, as we’ve already found the winner for a huge "WTF."

A Houston woman was doing her best to navigate her rental car towards a hotel room for the night when she veered off the road and got the car stuck in a drainage pond in Idaho. However, instead of getting out of the car and making her way to safety, she just decided to hunker down and wait for help in the car. For like three days. We’re thinking she must have really liked her rental car, and maybe she scored some kind of sweet upgrade.

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Trapped Onboard a Cruise Liner

Where: Italy
January 16, 2012 at 8:30 AM | by | Comments (0)

Late Friday night, The Costa Cruises ship Costa Concordia sailed from the Italian port of Civitavecchia near Rome, beginning what would be a nice Mediterrnean cruise. Shortly thereafter, it went off course and struck a reef, eventually listing and coming to rest off the island of Giglio.

The weekend brought new stories, new shocks and new questions of what exactly happened that night, and how it could even happen. Even the death tool is fluctuating. So until some concrete facts emerge, we're returning to a story we know to be the firsthand account from a friend who survived a cruise ship accident (though it didn't end up sinking).

Kathy, who was kind enough to share her story with us, was stuck onboard a crippled cruise ship for three days, albeit a couple decades ago.

Here's her story:

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Lost Luggage Drama Drops for Rachel Zoe in St. Barts

January 2, 2012 at 10:14 AM | by | Comments (0)

When you’ve got loads of designer clothes that just need to get there on time, we’d probably recommend carrying on. Unfortunately for Rachel Zoe—famous for dressing celebs and her The Rachel Zoe Project show—checking things was apparently the only option, and now she’s missing all kinds of stuff.

The stylist to the starts was heading to Miami and then on to St. Barts to celebrate the holidays and took to the skies aboard American Airlines thinking that everything would go swell. She was wrong, and now like a week later all her stuff is missing somewhere in the maze of baggage carts, conveyor belts, and handlers in the American Airlines system. Her Gucci jackets and Missoni goods are nowhere to be found, and she’s taking to Twitter to complain about it.

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Is This The Worst Flight Ever? Passengers Forced To Pay $36k To Finish The Journey

Where: Vienna, Austria
November 18, 2011 at 4:05 PM | by | Comment (1)

We’re sadly used to paying extra for our flights now – baggage, drinks, extra legroom seats, priority boarding… But one thing we never expected to have to shell out for is the actually taking off.

So it’s gobsmacking to hear of Comtel Air, an Austrian-based airline that, in October, launched a twice-weekly service from Birmingham (UK) to Amritsar (India). On Tuesday, a plane which should have taken off on Saturday, stopped in Vienna for a scheduled refueling; only, according to passengers, the pilot refused to take off until they clubbed together to pay £23,000 ($36,000) to get the plane in the air again.

For real.

After a six hour standoff (let’s not forget they were already three days late in their arrival), the passengers agreed to pay £130 each to get the ordeal over. If they didn’t have cash on them, they were escorted to ATMs in the airport before being let back onboard.

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Apparently AirTran Had a Little Cockroach Problem and Someone is Suing

November 14, 2011 at 9:31 AM | by | Comments (0)

AirTran has a lot going on now with that Southwest thing and all, but it looks like they’re headed for a little bit of legal trouble. Lucky for them we think it’s slightly frivolous, but that doesn’t mean they won’t have to send out the legal team.

A couple from North Carolina just filed a lawsuit against the airline because they weren’t too happy about some of their fellow passengers—cockroaches. Apparently the little bugs made a surprise appearance on their flight to Houston, including the air vents. The passengers tried to voice their concerns to the flight attendants, but they claim that their pleas for help were ignored.

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Happy Halloween: 11 Tales of 2011 Travel Hell

October 31, 2011 at 10:01 AM | by | Comments (0)

Happy Halloween!

This annual holiday is pretty much one of the most polarizing; you either love Halloween and get totally into it, or you don't care for it at all and end up cranky. Regardless, we can name one thing absolutely no one likes, and that's being stuck in travel hell. Some flyers experienced it this weekend during the various delays, cancellations and diversions, but sometimes nothing compares to retelling old spooky stories...

The Worst Moments of Travel Hell, 2011:

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Air India's Epic Tarmac Delay Almost Triggers Full-Blown Riot

October 17, 2011 at 9:03 AM | by | Comment (1)

Air India can't seem to do anything right. The company tried for years to join Star Alliance—we covered some of their bumbling efforts last May—only to recently give up and suspend integration efforts. Star Alliance's minimum membership requirements, which other airlines seem to be able to meet just fine, turned out to be just too difficult for the Air India people to figure out. On its face, that's not a particularly encouraging signal of competence.

Now comes news out of London that the airline was responsible for a truly epic nine hour tarmac delay, which came at the end—not at the beginning, but at the end—of a long-haul flight from Mumbai.

200 passengers plus one Boeing 777 minus any food unsurprisingly equaled grumpiness. If you're saying to yourself, "I can't believe cops weren't called to put down a riot," you'll be interested to know that cops were indeed called to put down what almost became a riot.

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E-Cigarettes on Airplanes: The Newest Big Debate

September 16, 2011 at 3:50 PM | by | Comments (0)

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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An In-Flight Meal Proves Deadly for One Jetstar Passenger

September 6, 2011 at 10:47 AM | by | Comments (0)

We’re always quick to criticize in-flight meals as hazardous to your health due to their taste, but a recent dinner aboard a Jetstar flight was actually deadly for one unlucky passenger.

During a flight from Singapore to Auckland, a passenger—Robert Rippingale—choked on his in-flight meal only an hour or two into the 11-hour journey. He was sitting next to his girlfriend, who initially thought he was just laughing, but soon the scene turned very serious.

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Oh, Goody: Tarmac Delay Laws Expand to Include International Flights

August 22, 2011 at 3:34 PM | by | Comments (0)

We've explained at length—see here and here, and probably here, and definitely this one—how the Department of Transportation's tarmac regulations are a recipe for travel hell. The assumption behind imposing huge fines for delays is that the airline industry simply wasn't trying hard enough to get its planes off the ground, and that market-based incentives like money and public relations disasters weren't enough to make them want to fly people around.

Put that way—and at the risk of belaboring the obvious—that's a pretty stupid assumption.

But regulations were imposed anyway and, as was easily and explicitly predictable, we ended up with more delays and more flight cancellations. So naturally the government has now expanded tarmac delay laws to include international airlines.

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Octomom's In-Flight Nightmare Becomes an Argument for Banning Kids from Business Class

July 11, 2011 at 8:48 AM | by | Comments (2)

We kind of forgot about Nadya Suleman—AKA Octomom—and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, after an appearance on Today last week she’s back in our minds because she’s now taking on air travel. Her appearance on the morning program was pretty awkward, as her kids ran loose all over the set. Ann Curry kind of stopped the interview a couple times and actually chased after a couple of the kids who ran behind different set pieces.

Apparently the real fun began on the way home on the family’s trip home from JFK to LAX. According to the experts over at TMZ, her American Airlines flight was already delayed by a couple of hours, so by the time boarding rolled around her kids were already pretty ripe and ready to get home.

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The Latest on the Southwest Airlines Issues, Delays, and Cancellations

April 4, 2011 at 8:42 AM | by | Comments (0)

Alright, so in case you missed it over the weekend, a Southwest Airlines plane had to make an emergency landing at a military base in Yuma, Arizona due to a 3' hole in the airplane. The good news is that the pilots and flight attendants kept passengers calm and got everyone back on the ground safely, but the bad news is that this could actually even happen.

Following the incident, Southwest sent a portion of their fleet in for extensive checks, examining their fuselages for cracking. So far they’ve giving the go ahead for around 19 planes to join their friends back in the air and they’re still busy reviewing the rest of the planes to ensure that they’re good-to-go.

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