News and notes from around the interweb:

• This is your semi-regular reminder that you don’t want the free hotel room that your airline will give you during a controllable overnight delay.

  Consider ‘self-insuring’ and just paying for your own room, or using credit card trip delay coverage if your rewards card offers it. While you may have an obligation to mitigate the costs this coverage would otherwise cover, I don’t believe you’re obligated to accept a room that’s uninhabitable.

  @AmericanAir Due to a flight delay from MSP to Atlanta with 1 stop in Charlotte, I was given a hotel with unacceptable conditions (bugs in bed, poor room quality). I had to return to the airport and sleep in a chair. Requesting a full refund for my night lost in Atlanta. pic.twitter.com/kOjSahvIAH

  — juan pablo (@Pablosierra82) November 14, 2024

• Anything that begins “The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey” is going to be a disaster, serving special interests rather than the public interest or just bungling matters. So it is with their plan to not just allow already-expensive food and drink prices at their airports rise but to obfuscate the extent of the increase by also allowing JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark airport vendors to add a 3% surcharge separate from the increase.

  Instead of capping prices at 10% over ‘street pricing’ (which the agency already fails to enforce) they’re moving that to 15% over. And then they’re going to let concessions charge 3% over their own published pricing (a deceptive practice) and call it an “employee benefits and retention surcharge.”

• Singapore Airlines to serve 2015 Cristal in first and suites class. As Quentin Tarantino said in Four Rooms, compared to Cristal “everything else is piss.” And then there’s Jay-Z:

  You can’t roll a blunt to this one / You gotta, you gotta well, ya gotta light a J,

  You gotta puff a J on this one / You can’t even drink Crist-OWL on this one / You gotta drink Crist-ALL.

  

• This data about India surprises me. So does China, in some sense, because while the country is obviously huge, rebuilding of flights between the U.S. and China has stalled.

• A back door to ConciergeKey status? Note that I do not give this claim much weight.

  Comment
  byu/cat-from-the-future from discussion
  inunitedairlines

• Tourist facing jail in Dubai after leaving negative review of dog groomer Even more striking, perhaps, is this sentence “A Sinn Fein spokesperson said Ms O’Neill was aware of the case and was making representations to the UAE embassy in London on behalf of Mr Ballentine.” Sure, they’re the largest Irish republican political party. I’m old enough to remember when they were the political wing of the terrorist Irish Republican Army. Now they are dealing with dog grooming reviews.

• From a congressional hearing on UFOs:

  “Has the government conducted secret UAP crash retrieval programs? Yes or no?” Mace asked.

  “Yes,” Elizondo said.

  “Ok. Were they designed to identify and reverse-engineer alien craft? Yes or no?” the lawmaker asked.

  “Yes,” Elizondo replied.

  “Are you read into secret UAP crash retrieval programs?” Mace later asked.

  “We would have to have a conversation in a closed session, ma’am,” Elizondo said. “I signed documentation three years ago that restricts my ability to discuss specifically crash retrievals.”