News and notes from around the interweb:
- A couple of weeks ago I argued that Denver airport was pretty good for making connections but for local Denver traffic it’s among the world’s worst. One of the problems, aside from distance from the city, is that the trains between terminals keep breaking down.
I heard from some of you who wanted to defend the airport’s honor, claiming they’d fixed the trains and this isn’t a problem anymore.
DEN trains down at 9am, starting to come back up now, TSA screening was paused etc pic.twitter.com/weqfbOza6X
— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) October 6, 2025
- Breakfast in the American Airlines Admirals Club Austin. (1) There was, in fact, no egg (2) These are… not sliders.
- I momentarily got my hopes up with this month’s Hyatt account summary email, subject line: “Your Account Summary – Jump-Start Next Year’s Status With This Year’s Stays” – I hoped it was a promo where fourth quarter stays counted towards earning status in 2026.
Sadly, no. They’re just telling you to stay more in the fourth quarter to make sure you have status next year. Which is odd considering the email also reminds me of my current year stats so far. This seems like a real messaging fail. Maybe don’t warn your members that have requalified that they need to stay more to requalify? At a minimum, some list segmentation should be worth the modest effort here.
- This is probably the most India story ever. Customs seized a man’s Rolex watch he was wearing as a commercial good imported for sale. They allowed him to have it back if he’d pay a fine and pay storage costs. He sued and won. The high court ruled a single watch simply didn’t constitute a ‘commercial quantity’ that triggered customs regulations, and the court “urged customs officials to avoid arbitrary or blanket classifications that may not stand up to legal scrutiny.” Yet the fine and storage charges stand.
- Hilton’s new ‘Outhouse Collection’
- Frontier Airlines CEO: Platinum members have an 80% success rate at getting a blocked middle seat upgrade in the first two rows of the plane.
Paging @Denver Refugee… Is there a walkway between terminals, if and when the trains break down? I’ve only ever taken the choochoos.
On that India customs scam, I’m reminded of Cairo airport, whose ‘agents’ tried to steal my professional camera equipment… man, I hate scams and scammers. Ugh.
Perhaps it is a “make your own” station. There is egg, it’s just a hard boiled egg and its served on the side. The sign does reference that the egg is boiled egg. So I assume the intention is that you get a croissant with the ham and the cheese, you get a boiled egg, you get a knife, you slice the boiled egg and put it on the croissant, and… uh… yeah, there you go.
As for whether or not it is a slider, while the internet suggests that “ham and cheese croissant sliders” are a thing, I tend to agree that in general if it’s not a served on a small bun, it’s not really a slider. Ideally it is a hamburger, but I suppose other small amounts of meat on a small bun could also be considered a slider. This just looks like a small sandwich, and not every small sandwich is automatically a slider.
Complaining about the distance to Denver’s airport conveniently forgets how atrocious the delays were for Stapleton – even back in the day, when there was half the airline traffic we have now nationally. Sure, you could save 20 minutes drive time from downtown… for your flight that was delayed by 5 hours.
The Denver airport’s single biggest design mistake wasn’t the underground baggage system fiasco. It was not putting a walkway tunnel between the terminals as an alternative to the trains. Some of us like to stretch our legs when we have enough connection time and choose walking anyhow. And one obviously is needed when the train is either oversaturated or broken.
Denver airport’s choice to *not* connect the terminals by walkway (other than the sole connector between the security checkpoint and only the first terminal) and to rely completely on the train, that was just a dumb decision and puzzling to build an almost-world-class airport with a single point of failure.
What puzzles me even more is that the city has an obesity rate below the national average and yet they still chose this, while many fatter cities built their airports with walkways between the terminals.
WWBD?
(What would Bluecifer Do?)
@Pilot Paul — Ah, that settles it, so unlike ATL, they did not put in walkways at DEN, huh. Time to start digging…
So stupid, the fathead architect who, with a pencil eraser, could have penciled in a walkway, much like ATL.
They should try to dig a walkway at least between A and B. It doesn’t have to be in the middle. ATL has a passage between B and C about 1/3 from the end but now they closed it off from passengers.
@JimC2 — On the ‘obesity’ comment, perhaps, “correlation does not imply causation,” meaning that just because two things happen together or show a similar pattern doesn’t mean one causes the other. As I was saying, ATL has those walkways… and ATL is also home of the Coco-Cola Company. Enjoy your preferred caffeinated sugar water!
he Denver International Airport’s planning included several flawed decisions. Designers assumed heavy bus and rail use, underestimating parking demand, leading to inadequate lots and a congested Peña Boulevard toll road. They pursued an unproven automated baggage system, which caused $2 billion in cost overruns and a 16-month delay when it failed. No pedestrian walkways were built to Concourses B and C, leaving the airport dependent on a train system without a reliable backup, resulting in bus shuttles during breakdowns. The airport’s remote location, 25 miles from downtown, was chosen for cost and noise reduction but created a single access bottleneck. Planners underestimated passenger growth from 38 million to 82 million annually, necessitating a $9 billion expansion. Lastly, poor coordination with airlines led to over 2,100 design changes, driving inefficiencies and financial losses.
@Rupert MacLanahan — Nitpicking here…Peña Boulevard is not a toll road; nearby e-470 is.
Ugh.. I’ve never been to Denver Airport but it definitely is on my list of bad airports now just from what I read here today.
In a perfect world all large airports should have an airside and landside people mover with walkable tunnels between each terminal in case those fail. Houston comes to mind for this design which has an elevated and underground for those purposes.
Walkable interconnected terminals airside and landside should be the minimum in airport design.
@Jinxed_K: The lines at TSA are enough of a reason to avoid DEN. One single point for everyone is an atrocious design feature. Same fail for ATL, where I”ve also experienced ridiculous waits.
@Rupert MacLanahan Congestion on Peña Boulevard is not the airports doing. Just look at the amount of development off of Peña Boulevard. None of that existed when the airport was built. The roadway had the capacity for the airport, just not for the airport and all the housing, etc. that have grown around DEN.
@Jinxed_K — I usually disagree with @AngryFlier on here… and today is no different. DEN improved those TSA lines since earlier this year, so he’s relying on outdated information, kinda like anyone who complains about LGA these days, who clearly hasn’t been there in years (brand new terminals). Also, @AngryFlier is apparently dull and lazy because if there was that much of a wait, he could literally walk between terminals at ATL, which unlike DEN, actually has walkways underground.
Repeat DEN apologist here. Every train delay gets publicized by a click hungry travel blogger, they are still rare. Hundreds of trips since 2016 and I’ve never run into it once.
Pick another random inconvenience that happens at any airport and then extrapolate it into a reason it’s the worst airport.
Definitely a single point of failure is a problem, but routing yourself around DEN on purpose just to avoid this is ridiculous.
Perhaps someday we’ll get a dicumentary on the planning of DEN. Each inteviewee is asked the question: “it never dawned on you to have a walkway in case of train breakdowns?”
Despite the fact that Denver International Airport was modeled after Atlanta, there is no walkway between terminals, allegedly because of the distance between concourses.
And as I always point out, the late Gene Amole (a local newspaper columnist – back when Denver had newspapers – who was an extremely vocal critic of building the airport and uncovered a lot of political skullduggery in the process) is still owed an apology. Probably Michael Boyd as well.
I’m always mystified that DIA’s designers didn’t take advantage of the fact that it is in the middle of nowhere. Endless space but you force everyone to enter through a central chokepoint and take an inefficient train, no consolidated rental car facility etc.
Maybe Denver should have spent money on upgrading the train instead of sending the stupid execs to the conference in Spain. To spend 19k on a biz class on United… that’s one of the biggest crime out there… if they had spend 19k flying ANA First through Tokyo, that would be a different story
@Denver Refugee — They were right in the end. As Captain Jean-Luc Picard said, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.”