Category Archives for Airports.
Airport concessions companies suck. Most of the restaurants you think you’re eating at aren’t actually run by the people you think they are. The brands are licensed by airport concessions companies like OTG, Delaware North, and HMSHost. When a brand wants to do something that’s actually good they even advise against it.
Yet St. Louis is about to demand another decade of mediocrity in a long-term no-bid deal with major political donors.
Employees at Philadelphia’s airport refer to the place as Filthadelphia. Birds are known to roam freely there.
It’s still surprising to just see a raccoon pop up at an OTG retail shop and help themselves to a snack while passengers are buying food at the self-checkout. Yet that’s just what happened last week.
Austin airport is experiencing record passenger growth, and the terminal needs to grow along with it. So the city’s solution is to use eminent domain to acquire property they already own, by cancelling a lease that they themselves signed. It’s a strange use of the government takings power, which underscores that the city never keeps its word and anyone investing $12 million dollars in a city project does so at their own risk.
Many of you have never heard of Billund Airport, but it’s the second largest in Denmark. They want you to know that they’re much bigger than you’d think, and they have a way of showing it that may inspire fear, anxiety, and in some of us… envy.
When we allocate ‘money for infrastructure’ we do stupid things with it, like giving $100 million to a zombie airport near Detroit that hasn’t had commercial service in 20 years. The plan is to create “a state-of-the-art airport” according to Detroit officials. Of course Detroit already has a state-of-the-art airport.
Two comedians are suing over being searched for drugs at the Atlanta airport while boarding their flights. The stops and searches lack probably cause, and are generally based on racial profiling (duh). Over a 9 month period, police stopped 402 passengers at the jet bridge in Atlanta. 68% of those were minorities. Fewer than 1% – just 3 – yielded ‘drug seizures’ like THC gummies and six prescription pills.
After “Des Moines…?” my immediate thought was to work through whether this was a display of their real capabilities, or a warning shot? But this doesn’t signal they are capable of more. A DDoS attack against a public-facing website is something any modestly savvy teenager could launch. It doesn’t serve as a message that ‘we can reach your systems, and next time will be worse.’
Instead it’s more moderately annoying for the individual airports involved at best, the kind of attack someone would launch who wanted to say that an attack was made without actually doing one.
CLEAR is a private, fee-based service that takes your biometrics and lets you identify yourself with your fingerprints or retina scan instead of showing an ID. At airports where they’re located you can then skip to the front of the security line – whether PreCheck or regular security.
However at some airports, like Atlanta, the lines for CLEAR can be longer than regular PreCheck and as a result this confers no advantage.
This stat may surprise you: Austin’s airport sees more diverted flights than any other airport in the country.
In 2019 there were 574 diversions to Austin. From May through August the airport saw an average of about 50 diversions per month over the past 15 years. Summer thunderstorms are a driver. There are (4) reasons more flights divert to Austin than any other airport.
A passenger checking in at the Atlanta airport reported being solicited for a bribe to avoid the overweight fee on a checked bag. He’s incredulous, despite the bribe offering a significant savings.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
