News and notes from around the interweb:

• British Airways wants its employees to take unpaid vacations

• The short, brilliant career of Alaska’s first woman pilot

  

• Chicago O’Hare is getting two new sort-of on-airport hotels and renovating the only true one, the Hilton.

  First, the Chicago Department of Aviation will finance and develop a new hotel adjacent to Terminal 5 that will provide ORD travelers with direct access to the terminal via the 24-hour Airport Transit System. The full-service hotel is projected to have 300 to 400 rooms, 25,000 to 65,000 square feet of conference space, banquet rooms, ballrooms and other amenities.

  The second on-airport hotel will be part of a new mixed-use commercial development adjacent to the multi-modal, joint-use facility now under construction on the northeast side of O’Hare. This hotel will have 150 to 200 rooms, a business center, office space and other amenities, and it also will be linked to terminals via the transit system.

  The final project involves renovating the existing O’Hare Hilton, with a goal of accommodating large-scale trade shows and events. Plans call for new amenities such as spas, extended room service, concierge service and quality restaurants and boutiques, according to plans unveiled by the city.

• Economics of fruits and vegetables in Chinatown

• Uber driver threatened customer with rock when he wasn’t tipped enough for returning iPhone

• A conversation with Gareth Evans, Qantas’s CEO of international operations

• Wyndham Rewards points now transfer to Avianca LifeMiles (HT: Loyalty Lobby)

• Qantas now sells airport lounge passes

• Strained analogy to explain increases in airline reservation change fees and checked bag fees to $1.7 billion during the first quarter: “Airline baggage fee collections are growing as high as the sun in today’s summer solstice sky..”

  Hint: when you see this sort of rhetoric it’s a clue that whomever is speaking wants a piece of the revenue (in this case higher airport infrastructure taxes).