If you travel a lot, you know there are some places that may not be as safe as others. Your Mileage May Vary in terms of what you do with that knowledge. But whereas you may know that a particular country may have a high crime rate, you may not be so sure about how certain places rank if you needed emergency medical assistance or how safe their roads are. Well, there may not be an app for that…but there’s an interactive map for it!
A few airlines have tried to make their safety spiels interesting, with varying degrees of success. The live ones can be pretty good when you have flight attendants who are creative and work for an airline that allows them to make the announcement more interesting. Of course, if you have boring flight attendants, or are on an airline where fun isn’t allowed to enter the picture, then you’ve got the same old, same old. Fortunately, there are plenty of good ones out there, and they’ve been saved for everyone’s future enjoyment, if you look long and hard enough on YouTube….
Continue reading “Why Can’t All Airline Safety Spiels Be As Cute & Funny As These?”
Who doesn’t love a road trip? Your spend hours in the car, talking, singing (OK maybe arguing a little bit here and there), seeing parts of the country that you may have never seen before.
We’ve given some advice for road trips in the past, from how to find out what restaurants, gas stations, hotels, etc. will be at the next exit, to learning what kind of interesting things will be along your route, to the pros and cons of the various map/GPS programs out there and even what to bring and NOT to bring in your suitcase. But what you bring specifically for the actual road trip can be just as important as all of those and, in some extreme cases, might just save your life.
I’ve used TripIt as my “go to” website to organize my travel plans for the better part of a decade. Their system to take a series of emails and make a single trip itinerary made my travel planning so much easier. I no longer had to worry about having the email from my airline, rental car, hotel, restaurant, theater tickets and public transit maps organized before my trip because they did it all for me.
I was very interested when I recently received an email telling me about a new feature in the Tripit mobile apps.
Continue reading “TripIt Will Now Tell You The Safety Level Of Your Travel Location”
If you’ve flown from Point A to Point B in the past few years (and if you’re reading this, chances are good that you have, and even quite possibly have gone from Point A to Point B to Point C to Point D and then reversed it with Points E, F and G before getting back to Point A…AND you went First Class with a flat bed and a shower and a Reflexology session…AANNDD you paid for it with frequent flyer miles that you earned by charging 8 bazillion dollars on your credit card ☺), you know that flying is more stressful that it used to be. There’s the traffic on the way to the airport, trying to find a parking space, standing on line at TSA, going through X-ray, possibly getting patted down at X-ray, possibly having your carry-on searched at X-ray, waiting for your plane, waiting even longer for your plane when it’s 
delayed, standing in a cattle call atmosphere until your section is called and being told there’s no room for your carry on so you have to gate check it. Then you finally get on the plane and it takes forever to get to your row because the guy in 24C is trying to get something out of his bag in the overhead, you’re squished into your middle seat for what could be several hours, there’s a screaming baby is behind your left shoulder, his older brother is kicking your seat incessantly, and the woman next to you has taken her shoes off and is eating a tuna sandwich, while the guy on the other side of you, who is manspreading, has only periodically stopped coughing and sniffling so he can spit his chewing tobacco into an empty Gatorade bottle that he has placed between the two of you. Granted, not everyone has to go through every aspect of that process, but most people have experienced at least some of those on just about every single trip. So yeah, it’s stressful. And when people are stressed, their sense of niceties can sometimes go out the window, things can become tense, and suddenly cell phone video cameras get turned on. The friendly skies are really not so friendly anymore, are they?
Four flight attendants who are members of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA were on the Today Show to discuss, among other things, conditions, safety and reducing Continue reading “Flight Attendants Speak Out About Cabin Conditions, Safety and Their Pet Peeves”
