TravelingForMiles.com may receive commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on TravelingForMiles.com are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. TravelingForMiles.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers.
A collection of travel related news links from around the web – some are more interesting than others!
Emirates debuts the world’s most passenger-packed Airbus A380 – If you’re planning on traveling in Economy Class on Emirates you may want to pick your routes with a bit more care going forward. From 1 December 2015 A380 flights on the Dubai-Copenhagen and Dubai-Bangkok routes will have a total of 615 seats on board. That’s over 100 more seats than are found on most other A380s. The Dubai-Kuala Lumpur route is due to get the same treatment in January.
They’ve achieved the cattle-truck configuration by eliminating First Class entirely (the two showers have been taken out too) and by removing 18 Business Class seats as well. A staggering fact is that Emirates made room for 120 more Economy Class seats by removing just 14 First Class suites – that’s how different the products are.
Did A Solar storm make every plane in Sweden disappear from the country’s radar screens – being an air traffic controller is stressful enough on the best of days so I can’t even begin to imagine what Sweden’s ATCs were going through last week.
A solar storm, from last Wednesday, is being blamed for an hour-long outage suffered by Sweden’s ATC. It is claimed than the storm disturbed the Earth’s magnetic fields to such an extent that it caused Sweden’s ATC systems to black out resulting in every plane disappearing from the radar screens for over an hour. Swedish airspace was closed until systems were restored.
Image: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center via Flickr
As dramatic as this incident certainly was, it may be a bit early to blame the sun for the problems. None of Sweden’s neighbours suffered any ill effects so it’s too early to rule out a more mundane (but still alarming) technical glitch.
British Airways launches a new magazine for First Class passengers – The premium cabin products haven’t had a proper overhaul in well over a decade, standards are continuing to slip across the board and British Airways decides to spend money on a new magazine. Good to see the boys and girls at Waterside have their priorities straight!
“First” will debut this month and will be found in First Class cabins and in Heathrow’s Concorde room too. The press release describes the publication as “Edited in a journal-like size, with interesting cover artwork and high-quality paper pages, the unique and compelling First is designed to offer a book-like feeling for its readers, rather then a magazine’s.”
Here’ a comment from the editor that amused me:
We wanted to break the mould of luxury content and create something genuinely thoughtful that would add some magic to the First flyer’s journey. By re-framing luxury with a hand crafted journal, we can offer First customers something truly enriching.
If they really wanted to break a mould or “create something genuinely thoughtful that would add some magic to the First flyer’s journey” how about updating the whole inflight product and dragging it into the 21st century rather than wasting money on a print publication that most people won’t read.
Cracker from the Titanic sells for $23,000 – Early last month a menu from the Titanic sold for over $80,000 and now a cracker from the doomed liner has gone under the hammer too.
For anyone wondering, this wasn’t a Christmas cracker that was sold but, instead, a biscuit that formed part of the survival kit in the Titanic’s lifeboats.
Image: Henry Aldridge & Sons
James Fenwick, a passenger on the Carpathia (the vessel that saved Titanic passengers), preserved the item in a Kodak film envelope alongside a photograph that purports to show the iceberg that sunk the “unsinkable” liner. It was a Greek collector who paid $23,000 for the biscuit…. so clearly not everyone in Greece is suffering from the financial crisis! 🙂
The photograph was also sold at the same auction, to a different collector, for $32,200.
While these prices may appear astronomically high it’s interesting to note that the price paid for both artefacts (combined) would still not have been enough to pay for a First Class ticket on Titanic. Back in 1912 a First Class ticket cost around $2,500 which is equivalent to around $57,200 in today’s currency. (HT: Road Warrior Voices).
How millennials and baby boomers differ when it comes to business travel – The Global Business Travel Association has published their latest “business travel sentiment index” and noted some significant differences between what millennials and baby boomers want – anyone surprised?!
Apparently:
Millennials are nearly twice as likely to want to travel more for business than Baby Boomers (45 percent to 26 percent, respectively), and a strong majority of Millennials (57 percent) believe technology can never replace face-to-face meetings to get business done.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that baby boomers have been traveling for decades and are more than a little bit jaded and tired of the grid while millennials still think they’re invincible and love what they perceive to be a jet-set lifestyle?
Additionally:
Millennials are far more likely to rely upon social media to meet up with friends when traveling than Baby Boomers (46 percent to 17 percent).
Did they really need to do a survey to find this out?! Next they’ll be asking which group is more likely to retire to Florida in the next 10 years.
While I confess to having found the two statistics above less than surprising, one statistic did catch my eye:
[Millennials] are far less likely to want to use their personal credit cards to float business expenses (53 percent to 69 percent).
In the modern world where credit cards are one of the primary sources of miles & points (and therefore cheaper, more comfortable vacations) I’m surprised that millennials aren’t more inclined to put as many expenses as possible on their personal credit cards. Perhaps this is related to the health of their bank accounts and the length of time it takes them to be reimbursed by their companies?
The most Instagrammed locations in the US and Canada – BusBud has used the location type and name of the popular locations on TripAdvisor across the United States and Canada, and looked at which locations produced the most hashtags for Instagram posts. They then ranked them in every state, province, and territory.
The most Instagrammed location types in the US arranged by state – screenshot from BusBud
The most common attractions that made the list are the various parks and geographic landmarks across the US but there are a whole range of locations that make the list that I wouldn’t necessarily have considered:
- Tennesse – Dollywood
- Kansas – Kansas State University
- Georgia – Atlanta Moror Speedway (I thought the Georgia Aquarium would win here)
- Connecticut – Mohegan Sun Casino
- Florida – South Beach (not Disney World or Universal)
And then you have a few of the more obvious:
- Nevada – Las Vegas Strip
- Arizona – Grand Canyon
- Wyoming – Yellowstone National Park
- Washington – Space Needle Seattle
For a full interactive map (US & Canada) head over to BusBud.
