NYT: Let’s Accept Tracking Our Movements In Order To Improve Airline Marketing

May 27 2020

Ultimately “ask[ing] the Departments of Transportation and Homeland Security to come up with new protocols for security, boarding and other routines to minimize risk” will be health security theater, more designed to make people feel like the government is doing something to protect them than actually doing something to protect them, an airline marketing expense as it were.

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New American Airlines Change Fee Waiver Suggests Leisure Travel May Return Soon

May 27 2020

American Airlines is extending its change fee waiver for tickets purchased in June – but only for itineraries to travel by end of September.

American seems to be saying that the lull in travel, while to some extent long lasting, is likely to bounce back. That’s at least true for leisure travel, since business travel wouldn’t be booking past September anyway. At a minimum there’s some chance that they won’t need to offer flexibility indefinitely into the future, so they’d rather offer this a little bit at a time. That makes sense, from a certain point of view.

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New Bill Would Require The Federal Government To Overpay For Hotel Rooms

May 27 2020

What Represenative Posey wants to do is require the federal government to overpay for lodging – not to reduce allowable hotel rates – even though market rates may be falling. The federal government spends billions on travel, and the hotel lobby shop AHLA thinks this will “allow hotels to be fairly compensated for the services they provide.”

In reality it’s a backdoor subsidyto hotel chains and owners. Although it wouldn’t work the way the hotel industry thinks.

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Travelocity Proves Fears Of Robots Taking Our Jobs Are Unfounded

man in suit looking at computer screen
May 26 2020

The Travelocity twitter account is like the Death Star’s exhaust port, or the vulnerability exploited in the final battle scene of Independence Day.

Jessica Langer shared her ‘earliest internet memory’ in response to someone’s silly question on twitter. It was a slow effort as her father tried to book a flight using Travelocity when she was really young. Langer was offering a genuine recollection, that wasn’t likely to garner much attention, except a Travelocity customer service bot decided to respond.

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