News and notes from around the interweb:
- A fake Justin Bieber conned the Wynn Las Vegas XS night club. “He performed and everything before they realized it wasn’t him.”
— Stasie Sats (@StasieSats) August 17, 2025
— Alex Duvall (@alexduvallin) August 18, 2025
- San Francisco airport will get two Minute Suites-style spaces in the Harvey Milk Terminal 1 and Terminal 3 with private rooms and showers. The RFP will be open for one week in November.
- See the plans for new concourse at O’Hare Airport
- United has a quiz about the airline but there’s no reward. Whenever I’ve seen these in the past, an airline has offered some token points for playing. The multiple choice answer in each case is the one that sounds most impressive.
- Southwest is looking to goose status numbers, perhaps unhappy with program member attrition. There’s a new promotion out to earn bonus qualfiying points: four one-way flights for 5,000 bonus points that count towards tier status, and eight one-way flights for a second 5,000 bonus points that counnt towards status. Must register in your account if available then book and fly by October 31 (pre-existing reservations don’t count, but you can rebook existing trips).
- Frontier Air Plane Damaged After Air Conditioning Hose Gets Sucked Into Engine
- Qatar Airways will move out of the American Airlines terminal 8 at New York JFK once terminal 1 opens, and will offer its own lounge. So much for close partnering!
Woah, QR moving from JFK T8 to T1 is fascinating; I have trips with them planned for 2026, so hope to see what they offer if it is indeed ‘their own’ lounge. Like, will it be a true DOH-style Business Class lounge (Al Mourjan), or just some random ‘Primeclass’ b.s. (hope not). Either way, kinda sad for us OW Emeralds to potentially no longer go to the Soho lounge at T8. Anyway, T1 looks like half of it is nearly ready to open! *fingers crossed*
That new concourse at ORD looks nice! I wanna hear from occasional commenter, @O’Hare Is My Second Home, on this.
Lame at no reward for the United quiz. Atlanta is the most impressive city versus Denver, LA, and Chicago? Debatable 🙂
The ORD renderings do look nice indeed, and a connecting pedestrian walkway, sweet.
I started the process of using up my Southwest points, turns
…out, nevermind
Will be interesting to see if Southwest publishes attrition for its “Elite” (and most profitable) customers. Especially the high spend credit card and million mile club (which they don’t even metric)…
@L737 — I got a 5/5… yay… As for cities, I’d take Chicago’s CTA over Atlanta’s MARTA any day. Speaking of mass transit, @Denver Refugee, how’s that RTD ‘A line’? Saw those trains when I stayed at the DEN Westin (looked like it ran regularly (guessing it just goes to downtown and back). Finally, for LA, after watching the ‘metro scene’ from Volcano (1997, starring Tommy Lee Jones), I’m good… don’t wanna melt into any lava… yikes.
@1990 – The “A” line runs from the airport to Union Station downtown. I’ve only used the leg from Union Station to the stop near Mission Ballroom (a great concert venue, BTW) but not all the way out to the airport.
The problem is, most of the light-rail lines in and around Denver are in such poor condition and/or constant repair that it’s faster, easier and safer to drive.
@Denver Refugee — Nice! Good line-up, too… glad to see Modest Mouse (October 1) and Mac DeMarco (May 3) are touring (of course, they’ll each also be in NYC, Oct 21 and Sep 7.)
@1990 — I haven’t ridden CTA too much, but I’m huge fan of MARTA (the light rail at least). Red line ftw. Also a big fan of Minneapolis Metro Transit. Blue line ftw.
This is only the beginning of the demise of Southwest, er, now Southworst airlines. After over 40 years as a loyal customer, Southworst has lost me – and thousands/millions of others. RIP once great airline.
@David R. Miller – Southwest has forced me back to flying United. Something I won’t soon forgive.
While the present international terminal is completely inadequate I have my doubts here. Need functional over pretty pictures. Looks like the follows the patterns of projects that look like the alien spacecraft has just landed — see the unpaid for Bears stadium which the team now wants tax breaks to move out of.
Justin Bieber? I see VFTW becomes TMZ on slow travel news days
@1990 – New Qatar lounge will probably be like their other remote lounges, eg not Al Mourjan level, but still pretty nice. I used to use their lounge in Bangkok all the time- showers, good selection of Arabic food, including baklava, two types champagne, white and rose, and multiple malt whiskeys…
@George — I read the press-release that Gary linked to; if it’s a Qatar-branded lounge, it should be better than the random lounges elsewhere; I’d hope it’s as good if not better than the Emirates lounge in T4 (which also has connection to the a380 jet bridge, but they rarely use it). BKK has some decent lounges, generally. (Planning a visit there next year; hopefully Thailand’s kerfuffle with Cambodia calms down well before then.)