News and notes from around the interweb:
- Passengers on Qantas flight to Tokyo endure ‘super uncomfortable’ experience as racy movie is played on every single screen. After an hour they realized what they’d done and switched it.
[T]he cabin crew asked passengers what movie they would like to be screened, and somehow, they landed on the 2023 title Daddio, which stars Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn.
- Maryland’s aviation administration, which operates BWI, had authority to select a concessions operator pulled by the state after appearing to rig the bidding in favor of a politically connected partnership benefiting HMSHost. Handed to the state’s department of transportation, they are nearing a recommendation though that, too, is engendering controversy.
These are lucrative contracts because you, the traveler, are the airport’s product and not the customer. And what they deliver to passengers is almost always terrible. You’ve got politicians selecting vendors for government-run airports, frequently benefiting a well-connected monopoly company.
So even if they weren’t trying to serve lowest common denominator customers quickly, with little storage space, supplies only going through security at off hours, and knives chained to the wall (and for the most part only electric cook tops) you’d still get a bad outcome.
- Hyatt Regency Trinidad backs off no longer accepting local currency
- TIL.
The specialized sports equipment section of the @SouthwestAir website is delightful #avgeek pic.twitter.com/LD8Ne1pKeV
— Ryan Warner (@cprwarner) October 5, 2024
- There’s nothing more fraught than picking someone up at the airport.
THIS. pic.twitter.com/oG0Mtau3sG
— The Notorious J.O.V. (@whotfisjovana) October 4, 2024
- If you’re of a certain age like I am, you may have done this too – I’d fly as an unaccompanied minor in the early 80’s and had to get dressed up for the occasion.
Our parents made sure we dressed up before getting on an airplane (back then anyway). pic.twitter.com/eHBdyXyx1L
— Joe (@jpr747) October 6, 2024
- The question is, in their desperate search for revenue is Southwest Airlines going to start charging passengers of size for their extra seat?
damn i didn’t know airlines did this pic.twitter.com/9stpsSGiap
— non aesthetic things (@PicturesFoIder) October 6, 2024
Decency is long gone . Not only on Qantas “entertainment” , but also regarding dressing properly on a flight . Now , parents actually encourage the mobile phone distribution of indecent material to their children . Consider “Rap” , for example .
A racy movie playing. I would probably be bored with it. (That movie didn’t do very well as compared to the production cost.) They should have just left the entertainment system off so it didn’t bother people.
re: meeting airline passengers … you have to be ‘of a certain age’ to remember the Airport Flight Insurance machines .. for a couple $$ you’d complete the form, designate a Beneficiary for $100,000, drop it in the box. Great business to be in, owner would probably come by once a week, if no plane had crashed recently throw all the paperwork away and keep the cash. But, there was a pre-paid envelope to send a copy of the Policy … friend said he sent it to his girlfriend d’jour, with the day/time/flight he’d be back on. Said he was always picked up …
The passengers voted for it, I don’t see the airline did anything wrong. That being said, I’m sure I wouldn’t have liked it–my experience is that R stands for Rotten. It almost always means something they spiced up in place of making a good movie. If it was good they would almost certainly keep it to PG-13 to get a wider audience. It wouldn’t bother me, though.
Why do US airport concessions (and stadiums and national parks, etc.) seem to be run by either HMS Host/Sodexo or Delaware North? Why hasn’t that been split up or subjected to anti-trust? I understand some markup to get concessions through security but a $1 Luna Bar at Trader Joes should not cost $4 at the Austin airport just because Delaware North had to run it through an X-ray.
The former Congressperson for my district, Eddie Bernice Johnson, made millions on concessions contracts at DFW and Love Field airports while sitting on the congressional committee that oversees those same airports.
While representing (I use that term loosely) one of poorer congressional districts in Dallas she lived in a high-rise luxury condo she somehow acquired in Dallas’s Victory area, which was developed by the Perot family. The same family that developed Fort Worth’s Alliance Airport — which her congressional committee distributed many millions of dollars to over the years.
She was most infamous for awarding her share of the annual Congressional Black Caucus college scholarships to members of her family. Well, all but one. That one went to an executive at DFW Airport. (Interestingly, she specifically asked that the scholarship checks be made out to her family members instead of to the colleges as is usually done.) When caught her response was that she didn’t know any of this was improper.