Public officials, just remember the airlines are always worse
This story would be funny (and I hope it was written, to some extent, tongue in cheek), if it weren’t true. The story, published in a government-affairs publication, ends with a discussion about the current presidential campaign. The author notes that no citizen who flies expects to hear any candidate say, “I am running for president to bring my vast management experience in the airline business to help government improve its efficiency, its effectiveness and its focus on customer service.”
When we were leaving Milan for New York, however, I was prepared. I checked our boarding passes and, once again, we were not next to each other in our originally assigned seats. Naturally, I raised this with the woman at the airline’s boarding desk.
She, however, felt no need to do anything. She didn’t even try to sound sorry. If the machine did it, that was the machine’s problem. Not hers.
Predictably, the flight attendants on board the plane were more willing to do something. After all, they have to deal with the occasional irate passenger, and doing so when cooped up in a confined space is not a lot of fun. They quickly arranged for a passenger traveling alone to switch seats. No machine was involved, just normal human courtesies.
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Writing in The New Yorker, Tim Wu of Columbia Law School explains that the many inconveniences imposed on passengers by the airlines are not mistakes. They are conscious decisions. The airlines “want to make you suffer.” Wu calls it “calculated misery.”
The objective is to get passengers to pay more fees. “Basic service,” Wu writes, “must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it.”
How haunted hotels turn fear into hard cash
Many hotels are turning fear of ghosts, or just curiosity about them, into marketing campaigns. I have had the opportunity to stay in many while working as a travel writer over the years. They all have great stories to tell, especially the Omni Mt. Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. And, there are many more.
A few years ago, I took this tour, and then spent the night in a pretty, historic hotel on this South Dakota town’s main drag. A 19th-century mining town swathed in American frontier lore, the city’s contemporary economy is driven primarily by Wild West nostalgia. As I checked into my hotel, the concierge shared both Wi-Fi rates and the best places to see the ghost of sharp-shooting, Sheriff Seth Bullock, who’d built the hotel in 1894. She also recommended a dinner theater in which local players re-enacted the deaths of frontiersmen murdered on this very spot. Hours later, I spotted the actor cast as slain villain Wild Bill Hickok drinking alone at the hotel bar, the glow of nearby nickel slots his only witness. A phrase from the hotel casino’s marketing material — “Seth will be watching” — rang all too true.
Unsubtle, yes; but those South Dakotans are onto something. Hotels around the world are capitalizing on creepiness, offering ghost tours and on-site psychics, starring in television programs like Ghost Hunters, and redesigning grounds to fulfill the expectations of horror movie pilgrims.
Record-breaking travel revealed: The over-the-top hotels, astonishing plane journeys and breathtaking natural wonders that you have to see to believe
Biggest, largest, deepest and other superlatives always get lots of readers and visitors. Here is a collection of some superlatives for travelers. Click through to the story — the excerpt is only one example.
The largest waterfall by vertical area may be the famed Victoria Falls, which sit on the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia, but it’s South America that’s home to the world’s tallest.
Salto Angel, or Angel Falls, located in Bolivar, Venezuela, has an impressive, uninterrupted drop of 807 metres (2,648 ft). And if you combine that with the additional sloped cascades, the entire thing measures an astonishing 979 metres (3,212 ft).
Fun fact: It was actually named after the American pilot, Jimmie Angel, who first recorded it in his logbook on November 16, 1933.
And, in case you were wondering, the world’s largest plunge pool — the lakes or depressions formed at the base of waterfalls by the erosive action of the water — is Perth Canyon, in Western Australia, measuring 300 metres deep.
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.