News notes from around the interweb:

• FoundersCard regular membership has an offer for free trial American Airlines elite status (90 days of gold or platinum, with a challenge to keep the status) (HT: Bougie Miles)

• “Rio averages 24 shootouts per day. Large hours-long gun battles often don’t even make the headlines.” (HT: Marginal Revolution)

• “I love going to a hotel, often a bad one when all they have is cereal and then I can have it again and then I don’t have to feel guilty. I won’t have it any other time.” – Tyler Cowen

• New paper on segmentation and competition in the U.S. hotel industry (HT: Tyler as well)

  Demand increases have been associated with more, but smaller, hotels in business travel destinations. In contrast, the growth in the number of hotels is much smaller, and the growth in average hotel size is much greater, in personal travel destinations. We provide evidence that this change reflects the emergence of two new classes of hotels – limited service and all-suites hotels – that did not exist before the early 1980s. These entrants – many of which had high quality rooms but which had limited out-of-room amenities – had a narrower competitive impact on other hotels than did the entrants of the 1960s and 1970s, which competed more on out-of-the-room amenities, and this led the industry structure to evolve differently.

• Virgin Atlantic will upgrade the oldest passenger on every flight over the holidays easy to do when business travel is non-existent, paid business dries up, this just comes at the cost of someone else who didn’t pay cash for business sitting there.

• How Hilton recycles used soap (HT: Reid F)