Category Archives for Airports.
Maybe one family member gets stuck at security, or you have PreCheck and they don’t. Or someone in your group has to go to the bathroom and it takes a long time. You’re cutting it close to your flight. Do you board without them? Do you split up, and maybe wind up leaving them behind?
Once you sign up for Global Entry the government performs a search on you daily, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s latest performance and accountability report.
If you’ve never missed a flight you’re spending too much time in airports, although admittedly there are flights where arriving late has real consequences – either because of the importance of a meeting on arrival, or because of limited connecting options. Contra this fast-spreading claim on social media, there’s nothing inherently irresponsible about missing a flight.
Two police officers were injured at Washington Dulles airport when a segway belonging to the airport’s Segway/T3 Patrol spontaneously caught fire. The departures level of the head house was evacuated for approximately 90 minutes while the fire department responded to the blaze.
French-based Idemia makes the machines TSA uses to verify ID and signs people up for PreCheck. They don’t want people skipping TSA ID checks, and CLEAR recently won a contract to onboard as a provider of PreCheck signups. So they’re in a “power struggle” against CLEAR, with both sides signing up high powered lobbyists.
In airports food preparation and food delivery all needs to be done quickly, because people are under a time crunch, at the mercy of airline schedules – often with short connections that airlines engineer in order to maximize the time their planes are in the air and to minimize total travel time on connecting itineraries which drives up ticket sales relative to competitor schedules. Self-service is a part of that, but so driving down costs and pushing sales is as well.
It doesn’t seem like the major challenge with transcon and long haul international flights from the airport is the airport’s name as port officials seem to suggest. And “East Bay Oakland International Airport” doesn’t seem like it would do much to change that. For political reasons it doesn’t seem like they’d consider “San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport.” But why not? European low cost carriers have long promoted Bratislava as Vienna even though it’s literally in another country!
Using unreviewable, secret and often arbitrary Minority Report-style pre-crime profiling as a basis for denying any kind of right is a huge departure for our system of justice. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is considering whether someone placed on a No Fly List as retaliation for not becoming an FBI informant, when there’s no suggestion they’ve done anything wrong, is a clearly-enough established violation of rights to justify damages. The Biden administration Justice Department says it is not.
TSA has put in writing in a letter to CLEAR that “it would require that a smaller proportion of Clear members undergo additional identity vetting.”
In both cases, an employee didn’t follow protocol. And in both cases, the employees and their managers were fired, and all employees went through re-training. You’d never get that kind of response from TSA!
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 »
