News and notes from around the interweb:
- Jeffrey Epstein stayed on friends and family rates at Hyatt. In fairness, Hyatt’s Friends & Family rate is often is a very good deal and it earns full points and stay credit.
Mildly interesting – Epstein stayed on friends/family rates at Hyatt
byu/dogemaster00 inhyatt - We all have hobbies.
A Moroccan man climbs onto the roof of a Vueling A320 at Valencia Airport after gaining access to the airport and using the aircraft stairs to get to the top of the fuselage.
Three civil guards convinced the man to come down approximately 10 minutes later.
A day before the… pic.twitter.com/ELghVQup7m
— Breaking Aviation News & Videos (@aviationbrk) February 1, 2026
- The Trump administration still enforces antitrust, even in aviation. This is relevant as we think about JetBlue, Spirit and Allegiant-Sun Country.
Reddy Ice wants to buy Arctic Glacier for about $126 million. Both make and deliver packaged ice (the bagged ice you see in stores) and supply commercial customers like airlines and airline caterers. The DOJ sued over their sale of ice to airliens and caterers in Boston and New York.
Airline caterers need high volumes in specific packaging like 5-pound heat-sealed bags, plus reliable airport delivery, which small competitors aren’t well-positioned for. The deal removes a key competitor, potentially raising prices or worsening service to airlines catering. They’ve proposed a consent decree that lets the deal close if the companies divest assets in these markets.
So ‘the Trump administration doesn’t enforce antitrust in aviation’ isn’t right, but they do seem to cut deals in the space.
- Bilt reports that “more than 83% of our active cardholders requested a Bilt Card 2.0.”
- Man arrested at MIA; accused of having more than 81 pounds of drugs in luggage He apparently didn’t know about the 50 pound limit. You get extra scrutiny for overweight bags! The bizarre thing is he wasn’t importing the drugs to Miami. He was taking them from Miami to Brazil. I guess that’s just a sign Miami’s got the good shit.
- Day passes to JetBlue’s new New York JFK lounge
- The biggest reason I used to avoid United, why I dread flying Southwest (much bigger issue than the switch to checked bag fees!), and why I won’t go near Frontier.
I think a lot of people underestimate how many people will switch airlines for great internet (@Starlink).
Airlines that don't have great internet will lose customers to airlines that do have great internet. https://t.co/JqzWr3sWOX
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) February 2, 2026
Gawd that seat at the bottom looks painful.
Gary, I’ll admit, I checked, glad to not see our dear thot leader on that list… phew!
I’m here just to see the nasty comments people will make once politics enters the Jeffrey Epstein discussion.
The DOJ is not really interested in antitrust issues. Their AI proofreader just hit on the key word “ice” and flagged the merger!
From what is being reported by people who actually care about this, not the corporate media in any sense, Epstein shared quite “a bit” with friends. They all should be put in a gulag, or worse, for the rest of their lives. And don’t just say Trump. He might be one of them but there were plenty of “Ds” “Rs”, and non-political types in the mix. This @Thing should NOT be political.
Dropsite News just released a 3-hour recording of a dinner conversation of Epstein, Ehud Barak, and Larry Summers. The leaks keep coming.
Well said, @George Romey, Clinton, Gates, any of them. Hold them all accountable. Spare none.
Gary, could you take 5 minutes to proofread your posts – “ airliens”.
You claim to be a thought leader in travel but you write like a 2nd grader.
George R says about Trump that “He might be one of them” in the Epstein-related crimes/crime files, but that discounts reality: Trump was and remains mafia boss of what remains of the Trump-Epstein-Maxwell crime family.
Derr…. so the Pritzkers only gave him a “friends and family” discount at their chain? that’s kinda… sad. I was expecting to see more of a discount.
You buried the lede. The takeaway should be that it is elitist leftists, not Trump, that had close ties to Epstein, in this case the Pritzkers. Once again the left accuses the right of what they themselves are guilty of. Shameless as always.
Trump was a leader in the Trump-Epstein-Maxwell crime family. The Trump-Epstein-Maxwell crime family aimed at compromising and extracting favors and waivers from elitist “centrist” and center-right types for the benefit of more right-wing types who are the “ideological” white supremacist fellow travelers of Trump and Netanyahu. Note that the Trump-Epstein-Maxwell crime family reeled in Netanyahu’s opponent Ehud Barak but not Netanyahu — this was not a bug, it was a feature of the program.