News and notes from around the interweb:
- Burn 100 miles on carbon offsets to extend the validity of your Cathay Pacific Asia Miles balance
- Hyatt announced the Capiton brand in 2019, with the first property opening in Memphis in 2022. It’s a competitor to Marriott’s Moxy, with tiny rooms and limited service. I don’t totally understand how it’s different than Hyatt’s tommie brand.
Well, three years later Caption Memphis is already closing and merging into the Hyatt Centric next door.
Carlisle plans to merge the two properties into a single 363-room Hyatt Centric, with renovations estimated at up to $5 million.
The combined hotel will feature one lobby, one restaurant, and one fitness center. Guest rooms on the Caption side — which this reporter found comfortable when visiting shortly after the property opened — will be upgraded to Centric standards. Both hotels are expected to remain operational during the renovation.
Wait… Centrics have standards?
- Clean. Your. Planes.
@AmericanAir Make sure you bring your sanitary wipes if you have to fly on American. AA planes have always been dirty but this is beyond disgusting. This is just from the headrest and seat belt buckle. pic.twitter.com/W2AyBR71CX
— Alex Zweig (@ualsdguy) August 25, 2025
- DraftKings bans use of credit cards to fund accounts for sports wagers DraftKings says it’s to protect customers from cash advance fees and interest payments, and not this:
The move, which became effective Monday, follows a $450,000 fine of DraftKings by Massachusetts regulators who found that the company improperly accepted credit card funds from customers. Massachusetts is one of several U.S. jurisdictions that have legalized sports betting, but prohibit the use of credit cards to fund customer accounts.
- Why Newark Airport sucks.
- Air Tahiti Nui only makes money on its LAX flights, plans to restructure Seattle and Tokyo losses are brutal.
OMG. . clean a piece of gym equipment , your car steering wheel or the keyboard at work with a wipe and it turns black too. People get over it!
I’m always up for a daily ‘Clean. Your. Planes.’ update… also, properly hire, train, support, and pay your cleaning crews. Don’t forget to do a ‘Repair. Your. Seats.’ (bonus points for duct tape pics).
As for Wendover’s Newark video (@L737, woop woop!), I watched it, but their initial focus on ‘the weather’ is a bit of a cop-out; the real issue at EWR is that they need to hire, train, and pay for more FAA staffing for the region (yet they wait for half-way through the video to get to that.)
There’s really no more room for more runways (unless they get rid of a highway or the nearby port, neither of which is likely to happen), but at least both parallel runways are back and running since May. That said, the July 14 Naples flight which waited over 4 hours for a gate is maddening.
As for the passenger experiences on-the-ground, EWR has already come a long way (new Terminal A, renovated 2 United Clubs at Terminal C); it’ll be a while before PANYNJ demolishes the old Terminal A (and eventually rebuild B-C); probably will have to wait for the mid-2030s for the next phases to be complete.
Sunviking82 is absolutely correct. Let’s bring some wipes to that goofball’s house and see what we can find.
@1990 — Woot! Wendover has been doing more aviation videos again recently and I’m all for it. Your analysis was pretty thorough, I too thought the Naples flight example was wild. Weather was also not something I originally thought of after seeing the title so I was surprised to see it mentioned first, making it seem like the primary reason. Lots of problems, some unfixable, some that will take a very long time to rectify. Not ideal.
@L737 — There are still some decent O.G. YouTubers out there (not to leave anyone out, but I’ll admit, I get a little excited whenever CGP Grey or OverSimplified History release something, mostly fun stuff.) I enjoy Adam Something’s critiques (mostly infrastructure related), though, he goes a little off on the video-game tangents sometimes. Johnny Harris got pretty big over the years (though, I especially liked his Vox ‘Borders’ days). For serious/topical/policy news, I prefer Ezra Klein. And, because I still care about the environment (you know, because, we should still want clean air and water and food, etc.), shout out to Rollie Williams over at Climate Town. Haters gon hate, but those guys are all alright by me.
I just looked at the T100s for Air Tahiti to/from Seattle – holy crap. Its barely a 25% load factor this year; 2024 it averaged in the high 80%, mostly because the flight continued on to Paris