News and notes from around the interweb:
- The TSA wants to be armed. In Virginia, the director of the charitable gaming commission used to be armed until my then-boss was appointed to its board and pushed to eliminate this militarization. The TSA doesn’t need its own armed force — there’s already an on-scene armed force in the form of police.
- The Venetian and Palazzo are being sued over resort fees. While consumers kvetch about well-disclosed checked bag fees, hotels engage in perhaps the most egregious deceptive pricing practice in travel.
- Club Carlson 5000 bonus points per night promo
- The airline flight that carried more drugs than people. (HT: Idir)
- In light of the Germanwings tragedy, Norwegian now requires two crew members in the cockpit at all times. Lufthansa will too. As will Air Malta and easyJet. One benefit of this change is it should forestall the otherwise-inevitable call from pilot unions for a return to 3-person cockpits.
I imagine that the director of the charitable gaming commission was not in direct contact with machete wielding maniacs, so it’s a bit of a different situation. Not at least acknowledging that the TSA does work in a dangerous environment where guns are unfortunately necessary is a gaping hole in your logic.
To be clear, it’s the head of the union which represents bargaining-unit TSA employees that is advocating arming some (not all) TSA employees. At this time DHS/TSA isn’t making any similar call.
I would wholeheartedly oppose any such arming of TSA employees – it’s completely unnecessary and any growth to TSA powers or scope is bad IMHO. Hopefully the idea goes nowhere!
@Askia there are plenty of guns held by airport law enforcement already. putting those in the hands of tsa doesn’t change law enforcement’s access to weapons on the scene.
I really think the “resort fees” are a different type of deceptive practice than most, since you can’t get out of them, and they cause a property to list as cheaper than it really is in searches. It is a case of the bad driving out the good, since a property not wanting to deceive its customers is penalized by appearing to be more expensive by comparison in search results. Regulators should not allow travel providers to assess any add on costs that are not imposed by some outside governmental or taxing authority, unless they are actually optional to the customer (such as bag fees, GPS system, wifi where there’s a charge, etc.). The real prices should be required at first search otherwise.
Arming the TSA, even “select” personnel is not a good idea. Let’s not overreact because of one nut bag with a machete. Honestly I lost my faith (or what was left of it) when PreCheck became a place to dump non seasoned (and non vetted) travelers for whatever reason.
I agree with DaveS. This is just like how airlines used to price flights and when you went to check out it was totally different. They changed the law to require airlines to include all the fees, taxes, etc. (well, most), and it’s now much easier to compare apples and apples. Let’s do the same thing for hotels. (Especially since some cities have such insane taxes that the cost is more than 20% over what you are quoted).