Tag: bad ideas

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Confirmed: New Spirit Airlines Fees are Deeply Hateable

May 4, 2012 at 9:00 AM | by | Comments (0)

Airline industry watchers awoke Thursday to a Fox News story about the latest Spirit Airlines clusterfark, wherein the airline is refusing to refund the $197 ticket of a dying Vietnam vet who was banned by his doctor from flying. The mess involves typically grating behavior from the deeply obnoxious airline, so that's not what was notable about the writeup.

Instead what got people's attention was that Kate Hanni, executive director of Flyers Rights, has apparently chosen to inject herself into the controversy and to start throwing around language about "meat in a seat" and "history of cruelty." This is... disconcerting.

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Let's Talk About Tripadvisor's 'Friend of a Friend' Thing for a Sec

April 11, 2012 at 3:31 PM | by | Comment (1)

Not only have some travel companies ignored our advice and rushed to develop Facbeook applications even though their business models have nothing to do with social media, but now there are entire sub-industries devoted that nonsense. We have no idea how that happened, or why people are building startups on the assumption that you're going to share your travel details with the friends of your friends, but apparently the era of "social travel" has arrived. For at least the next few months.

"There is a trust forged in that tribal mentality that traditional travel companies or guides can't tap into," says one startup entrepreneur in New York City, who suggests that people will go where their online friends tell them to. That's an interesting point inasmuch as, first, we don't exactly know what it means ("tribal mentality"?) and, second, it's almost certainly untrue.

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If One Lawmaker Gets His Way, National Parks May Go Up For Sale

March 21, 2012 at 9:58 AM | by | Comments (0)

It’s not even April yet and already we know what we want from Santa this year. On the list: our very own national park, and it sounds like this may be a possibility if a US Representative gets his way. The deal is that one Congressman thinks that selling off some of the country’s national park land is a great idea, as this could raise some cash to pay down the country’s debt.

Sure paying off the national debt sounds like a pretty good thing, but we’re hardly 100% behind the idea to sell off spots like the Grand Canyon in order to do so. Cliff Stearns—he’s a Republican from Florida—thinks that the sales to raise some extra funds is what any family would do, so it makes perfect sense for the government to do so as well.

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Man Opens Airplane Emergency Door to Get Rid of Crying Child

March 7, 2012 at 1:54 PM | by | Comments (0)

Everyone's been next to the screaming child on the airplane. Your blood pressure instantly shoots up, and it doesn't take very long before you sincerely start to believe that travel with children on flights should be banned by law. The parents are almost always mortified, which somehow makes the entire spectacle even more annoying because in a very precise way it's all their fault, so what are they doing getting annoyed?

There was an incident a few years ago when Allegiant Air removed an entire family from a flight (parents and kids) because the parents couldn't or wouldn't get their adorable little angels under control. There's a reason why some people are calling for banishing kids to the back of airplanes.

Fast forward to last month in Vietnam, when an obviously harried woman—accompanying an tantrum-throwing child—just could not wait any longer to get off her Vietnam Airlines airplane. The flight was over and she had simply had enough. So she asked the man next to her, 29-year-old Le Van Thuan, to pop the emergency door and release the slide. And, because this story is awesome, that's exactly what he did.

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One Town's 'WTF' Tourism Campaign is Over Before It Starts

March 1, 2012 at 9:38 AM | by | Comments (0)

If you didn’t already hear about the latest tourism campaign from Fruita, Colorado, then we’ll fill you in. Local officials thought it was pretty darn clever to promote the town with a WTF—Welcome to Fruita—sticker. Well it sounds like they were all ready to send the graphics off to Kinko’s for printing and distribution, but some town residents had a little WTF moment themselves and now the party is over before it even began.

A local group initially made like 500 of the stickers and they kind of took off, and that’s when the town decided to jump onto the WTF bandwagon. Unfortunately now that the tourism board has had some time to think things over, the idea is out. The decision comes at a perfect time, however, since the next move would have been installing a billboard along the interstate that proudly exclaimed Welcome to Fruita—the abbreviated version—to passing motorists.

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Eight Travel Safety Lessons We Learned the Hard Way, After Getting Robbed

February 27, 2012 at 4:07 PM | by | Comments (2)

Only a few days ago, while bicycling around Argentina's wine country, we were robbed [read the full story here]. The banditos only got away with our Nikon DSLR camera, and it could have been much worse, but regardless we've come away with a slew of lessons learned the hard way.

While the "what ifs" stream through our mind, here's eight tips to avoid being a victim:

· Keep moving. Even if you're lost, try to keep moving and look alert (maybe go around the same block) or head towards a busier area to ask at a major business for help with directions.

· Always read about crime and safety considerations when you travel to an unfamiliar city. In this case, we had actually read about the snatchings on WikiTravel, so we knew immediately what was happening as soon as the man surprised us by putting his hands on the camera in our bike basket. Alas, it was because of this warning that we had wound the straps around the handlebars, which prevented him from taking off with our backpack as well.

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Hong Kong Airlines Busted for Flying Dolphins from Taiji, Japan

February 27, 2012 at 9:04 AM | by | Comments (0)

Everyone knows that it’s kind of risky to transport pets to here or there—except when using Pet Airways of course. Risky is probably just the beginning when it comes to sending a few critters that love the water, and that’s just what happened when one airline decided to send some dolphins across the globe underneath the belly of an airplane.

We’ll let you know that all the dolphins are doing well, but Hong Kong Airlines is getting called out for sending five finned friends as cargo between Vietnam and Japan. Some are calling the shipping conditions as bad as “flying coffins,” as the critters were stuck for as long as seven hours. The dolphins apparently were being sent from the Japanese town of Taiji, which—to make matters worse—has a less than stellar reputation due to their annual dolphin hunt.

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Robbed While Biking the Argentina Wine Trail: Our Firsthand Account

February 23, 2012 at 3:20 PM | by | Comments (2)


Policia truck in which we rode

Me robaron. Me robaron. ME ROBARON. I was robbed.

I've gotten very good at saying this in Spanish in the last 20 hours, as yesterday around 3pm local time in the wine tourism town of Maipú, Argentina, a man reached into the basket of the bicycle I was riding, and stole my Nikon DSLR camera. That's the simple way of explaining what went down; the full explanation is far more harrowing, and you can guarantee that I've spent every waking moment since then replaying the events in my mind, wondering how a nice day of biking to vineyards turned into an ordeal involving 17 bulletproof vest-wearing members of the local Policia.

Here we go.

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Spirit Airlines Throws Temper Tantrum, Hikes Fees

February 3, 2012 at 1:17 PM | by | Comments (0)

It seems like only Monday when we were saying that it might be a bad idea to force airlines—some of whom barely have a pulse, as exemplified by the American Airlines bankruptcy—to give up on all the ways they've invented to make money. No one denies that some airline fees are insanely grating, and we complain about them as much as anyone, but with the airline industry recovering from the worst decade ever, maybe this isn't the perfect time for heavy-handed government brainstorming. No one wants a repeat of the tarmac delays debacle, after all.

Naturally the Department of Transportation has chosen now to pass a series of new regulations, including a ban on ticket-change fees for changes made within 24 hours of booking. And we could be doing a post about whether those are bad ideas in theory or in practice or in both. But instead we're going to write about the reaction of Spirit Airlines to the DOT's decision. Because if theRyanair of North America has a specialty, it's in taking something mildly obnoxious and completely owning it.

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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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Wait. The TSA Intercepts How Many Guns Per Day in Airports?

January 18, 2012 at 2:02 PM | by | Comment (1)

Ideally we'd like to spend this post criticizing TSA for various inadequacies implicit and explicit. There's something not quite right about the agency's new "we'll retest for radiation levels but not really" announcement on full-body scanners, especially given its extensive and well-documented past dissembling on the issue. There are still issues to discuss from last year about the contradictions in pushing for private TSA baggage screeners. We'd like to know why it was necessary to tase a traveler to the point of hospitalization at the Sacramento International Airport. Someone should ask what steps are being taken to prevent a repeat of the $40,000-stealing TSA agent. And isn't there something wrong with airport security when $400,000 worth of coins are getting left at security every year by flustered travelers?

But we can't talk about any of that, because people won't stop trying to bring weapons on airplanes. Especially guns. Lots and lots of guns. So instead of this post being about the many ways TSA makes traveling worse, it's about one very specific way that travelers make traveling worse.

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An Early Nomination for the Stupidest Travelers of 2012

January 2, 2012 at 8:58 AM | by | Comments (0)

Last year it took us until the end of January to open nominations for the stupidest traveler of the year. But now that we're living in the future, here in 2012, everything moves faster.

It's the first week of the new year and already there are stories of travelers who—if they aren't straightforwardly blistering idiots—start off at least as idiot-adjacent. But then at the end there's a punchline that literally causes our blood pressure to spike, and that crosses the line into incandescently stupid.

The Fickes family of North Carolina has quite the broode. There are the two parents, Kathy and Jason Fickes. Then there's their 3-year old son. Then there are their 18-month old twins. Then there's their eight-month old baby. All six of the Fickes were traveling to Chicago to visit grandparents over Christmas. So far so good. The problem enters inasmuch as they tried to fit the entire family into a single row in coach on a US Airways flight.

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