News and notes from around the interweb:
- He rented a car from Hertz and actually deserved to get arrested because he stole the car. It’s rather remarkable, isn’t it, that in our society we can just walk up to a rental counter and they give us the keys to a vehicle worth tens of thousands of dollars, and just trust that we’ll bring it back. And usually that works!
And yes I know all of the institutions that are set up to incentivize this and make life difficult for those who don’t comply, but that’s the point, we have a set of rules that makes this possible!
- An American Airlines passenger filed a federal lawsuit on Friday over a trip from Baltimore to Liberia, Costa Rica via Charlotte where she’d prearranged mobility assistance.
After landing in Costa Rica, she says a ground employee ignored repeated instructions about how to move her safely and pulled and lifted her by the right arm while trying to get her out of her seat, she heard and felt a crack, and wound up with a fracture.
The incident happened on June 27, 2024 – so this was the last day to file before the statute tolled. American has had challenges with its handling of passengers with disabilities.
- What Waymo’s new minivan is like
- This opens with a coach cabin but here’s the thing, Air France has air conditioning even on the ground before engines start (thanks to the APU).
The French are making some incredible AI videos about their current predicament pic.twitter.com/Up2NiZUDfE
— Justine Moore (@venturetwins) June 27, 2026
- Amazing. But not as cool as cooking garlic shrimp in a Delta Air Lines lavatory. That’s legend.
discovered a dude on Instagram who cooks meals using the hotel room kitchen..and this lasagne looks good AF pic.twitter.com/yUO16zBooj
— Trung Phan (@TrungTPhan) June 27, 2026
- Airlines need to cut this out. Forced gate-checking of carry-on bags is bad enough. When passengers board and see there was plenty of space for the bag that was just confiscated, it’s genuinely infuriating.
This is costly to the bottom line, too. As American’s Senior Vice President Heather Garboden flags, one point of net promoter score improvement yields $50 million to $100 million in revenue.
@AmericanAir your hyper aggressive and extremely rude Manager on duty at BOL 2:27 flight does not understand basic courtesy ; just because she has power she began threatening me on a flight which has empty space to stow luggage and did not allow even one bag from 4 tickets pic.twitter.com/MoqiziZTvI
— Satyaprakash B (@Satts) June 28, 2026
“one point of net promoter score improvement yields $50 million to $100 million in revenue.”
I call BS.
Typical of the French government, the canicule didn’t become such a big deal until it moved east to hit Paris. So, as temperatures moderated in the West, the Paris-based government imposed some bans:
1. No drinking alcohol in public 12pm last Friday until 7am last Sunday (with it allowed 7am-12pm Saturday)
2. No to-go alcohol sales after 6pm Friday and Saturday
None of this affected bars/restaurants except it meant crowds couldn’t get off terraces. My hotel has AC, so no worries here.
Any rental car in which you do not bring the car back by the agreed day and time is automatically considered a stolen vehicle. The rental companies have been burned too many times. I rent with Enterprise and you are required to confirm the return day and time or force to update/change the reservation and pay the additional cost.
As far as AA. The only thing I see are gate agents recommending passengers in groups 8 and 9 check their bags, for free of course. They are not forced to unless the flight attendants advise that all bins are full. Anyone saying anything different on a travel site is full of donkey dung.
If you want to steal a Hertz rental car, just rent it in the US and drive it across the border to Mexico.
No. Cooking shrimp in the lavatory of an airplane is NEVER cool. Vomit-worthy, but never cool.
I am often troubled by the statements gate agents make about “bins are full.” They are making statements of fact, which customers then rely on in taking actions to their detriment (checking bags with inevitability of delay for pickup, and risk of theft or damage). And this is not just a few rogue employees: To the contrary, airlines have designed a system where gate agents are pressed to get flights out on time (lest they be docked in performance reports), and are practically compelled to make statements to customers about bins supposedly being full, even though airlines have not trained staff to inquire one way or the other (whether the bins are actually full), and there probably aren’t enough staff to check in any event. To me it seems fraught as a legal matter. On the right facts — “I didn’t want to check this bag, but the airline required me to do so because they said, falsely, that bins were full; but they were not, and here’s the photo proving it” — this could be a decent lawsuit. Short of a lawsuit, what other path to get airlines to stop making things up in this area?
Mah boy finally made it outta the basement… he enjoyin’ some R&R…
Do airlines have a way to track the number of carryons being brought on board and compare that to the estimated number of spaces in the overhead bins? I realize that bags are different sizes and so forth, but it seems like they could get a pretty good estimate before having to require checking bags when the bins are unlikely to be full.
“Do airlines have a way to track the number of carryons being brought on board and compare that to the estimated number of spaces in the overhead bins?” I suspect what they do is figure that a full (say) 320 can hold the bags of X pax. This 320 is full. Through group 4, there are <X. And, through group 5, it goes over X. Solution? Right before calling group 5 to board, you announce that all bags must now be gate checked. If lots pax have bags, the bins are full. If the ratio of bags to pax is lower, they go out with a lot of empty bins. BUT, the plane goes on time.
@Ben Edelman, I submit the best you could hope for with the “you said the bins were full, you lied” argument is they change to “you must now check bags as we risk running out of bin space.” An empty bin on departure doesn’t make the latter quote a lie. Plus, even if they could work out a way to get this right (i.e., no plane goes out with empty bin space when “involuntary” gate checking was required), and I wish they would, they’d still have to force gate checking while some bins have (temporary) empty space, as there bags are still in the hands of the boarding pax. Simply, the can’t wait to say the bins are full until they are truly full, as that means dozens of pax on the plane will need to ofload their bags.
@1990’s Mama — Thanks mom…