President Trump Claims Credit for Planes Landing Safely in 2017

kim jong ung looking over balcony
Jan 02 2018

Commercial air safety has consistently improved for the past 35 years, but Trump has been in office just one year.

Oddly though his primary air travel safety initiative — spinning off air traffic control into an independent non-profit corporation, separating out regulation from the actual provision of air traffic services, an ICAO best practice the US currently fails to follow — failed to gain traction in 2017.

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How to Destroy a Hotel’s Online Reputation in Under 24 Hours

pink hotel with palm trees
Jan 01 2018

While the Waldorf=Astoria Boca Raton Resort and Club isn’t really my personal style (I’ve never been a big fan of The Breakers, either) it certainly receives its share of plaudits and pulls high room rates in-season.

Since the YouTube video went up last night over 650 one star reviews of this property have been posted to Yelp. It’s overall Yelp rating has dropped down to 1.5 stars.

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How Long is Too Long for a Hotel to Wait to Charge You After a Stay?

cityscape
Jan 01 2018

A year ago the Hilton San Francisco Union Square double charged guests checking out on a single day. A few days later they corrected the problem by double-refunding guest credit cards. So those guests weren’t charged for their stay.

These two countervailing errors, generating four credit card transactions, sat for a year. Then a full year later Hilton charged everyone’s cards again.

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Man Arrested on New Years Eve With ‘Small Arsenal’ of Weapons at Hyatt Regency

hyatt hotel
Jan 01 2018

A man was arrested on Sunday at the Hyatt Regency Houston on Louisiana Street in advance of a New Years party expected to draw 2000.

He was apparently just holding onto the weapons in his room for safe keeping so they wouldn’t be stolen out of his truck. But he was drunk early Sunday morning and harassing guests in the lobby. And he had just been arrested on weapons charges a week earlier.

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Police Raid YouTube Prankster’s Room at Waldorf=Astoria Boca Raton

police entering room
Jan 01 2018

A YouTube prankster was on vacation at the Waldorf=Astoria Boca Raton Resort and Club and three hours before New Years’ the property kicked him out — apparently because they were afraid he might perform a prank there though he didn’t bring his camera crew.

He says he refused a conversation with the manager because he was napping when they came to the room, and that the manager and police entered the room — his girlfriend was naked, and they wouldn’t let her get dressed in private.

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American Airlines is Done Painting Planes

Dec 31 2017

American Airlines is done painting planes — updating the old bare metal legacy American Airlines livery, and repainting US Airways planes to say American. MD80s, slated for retirement, haven’t been painted.

The livery was hugely controversial, many customers, critics and employees didn’t like it. With the merger they’d be repainting even more planes, adding 299 legacy US Airways aircraft to the project. At the time it was an open question whether they’d keep the new livery that American rolled out before the merger.

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