Sign the petition to open travel to Cuba

by Brenda Yun on


Americans today have the right to travel to any country in the world except Cuba. Recently, the OpenCuba.org campaign, which gives people a way to petition U.S. leaders to end the 50-year Cuba travel ban and give all Americans the freedom to travel to Cuba, has been creating some buzz on the web because of the positive developments happening on Capitol Hill regarding lifting travel restrictions to Cuba.

159 Congressmen and 29 Senators recently sponsored the bipartisan Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act, which seeks to open up travel to Cuba for all U.S. citizens. The opportunity to end the 50-year ban hangs in the balance. Each of us can take part in the movement to give Americans the right to travel wherever they choose by signing the petition.
The momentum behind this issue is growing. A recent poll shows that 67% of Americans favor allowing all Americans to travel to Cuba. Cuban American groups such as the Cuban American Alliance and the Cuban American Commission for Family Rights have also endorsed the initiatives sparked by OpenCuba.org. Over 50,000 people have already visited OpenCuba.org to make their opinion heard.

To seize the moment and join the growing number of OpenCuba.org supporters in urging U.S. leaders to give all Americans the freedom to travel to Cuba, visit http://www.OpenCuba.org, and encourage others to do so as well.

Americans have long had the freedom to travel almost anywhere in the world, and should continue to exercise this freedom wherever possible. This ability to travel and the resulting exchange of ideas between people from different countries can be a powerful force for positive change.

For information on my own travels to Cuba earlier this year, check out my Cuba Libre series HERE.

JetBlue, United jump on Twitter for cheap tix

by Tom Johansmeyer on

JetBlue and United Airlines are pushing the first taste of cheap fares out on Twitter. They hope to use what USA Today calls the “uber-trendy form of messaging” to push seats on flights that may have vacant seats prior to wheels-up. After deals appear, they don’t always stick around long. JetBlue’s first “Cheep” (a variation on “tweet”) offered a $9 one-way fare from JFK to Nantucket. The model that’s emerging puts JetBlue’s fare tweets out on Monday mornings and offers around eight hours to act on them.

United Airlines has had its “twares” in action since May, and the element of surprise is a factor. The discounts can be released without warning, and there’s no discernable schedule. The deals can live for as little as two hours, forcing Twitter-using travelers to act fast.

Take a star-studded vacation the sneaky way

by Annie Scott on

On Location Vacations is a website which tells you where the movies are shooting — like, exactly. People from crew members to extras to locals send in tips to the site to give you the locations of on-location movies, TV sets, and more.

The tab Daily Filming Locations is very well kept-up and features a detailed list of filming locations every weekday, as well as upcoming shoots they know about and requests for more detailed information where they have an incomplete tip.

This is obviously helpful if you’re gonna be in, say, New York City and you love “Gossip Girl” or “30 Rock” (both of which shoot their interior shots at Silvercup Studios but frequently shoot their outdoor scenes all over Manhattan), but you can actually plan a whole vacation with the site — just click on the Road Trips tab.

Hollywood studios love a bargain as much as the next company, which is why they often won’t be shooting where the movie is actually based. If you look through the “Road Trips” section, you can plot out tours of old Hitchcock sites, find random small towns where the celebrities are currently canoodling in local diners on their off hours, or find information on how to become a tipster yourself (they’re currently looking for more in Vancouver).

Want to just stalk the celebrities themselves and not their sets? Well, that’s there, too. Check out A Star Stalking Western Road Trip among others to find out where the celebrities live, and hook together a paparazzi-style trip all your own.

The site also features Events, Featured Essays, News and On Location Photos, but what really caught our eye was the Travel Inspiration tab, where they offer ideas for taking trips you might not have otherwise considered. If you’re too lazy for all this? Just type your current city into the “Search” field and see if there’s anywhere you can go spy on your lunch hour.

You might want to hit Wikipedia and catch up on Photography and the Law before you go … just sayin’.

NYC best city for singles (if you own a computer)

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Looking for love lust on your next vacation? Your next trip should be to New York, which has knocked Atlanta out of the top spot as the best city in the country for singles. And, why wouldn’t it? You have more than 8 million people chasing their dreams, so the choices are endless. There’s one of everything, so in one night, you could meet every flavor of scumbag available. But, there’s an upside to all this variety, so don’t give up hope yet!

Atlanta fell to the sixth position, with Boston, Chicago, Seattle and Washington, D.C. occupying the second through fifth spots in this annual survey by Forbes.com. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Milwaukee and Philadelphia round out the top 10.

This is New York’s first time in the #1 spot, which evaluates 40 of the largest cities in the United States for “coolness, cost of living alone, culture, job growth, online dting, nightlife, and ratio of singles to the entire population.” Notably absent are: willingness of hot girls in that city to talk to you, cost of buying several drinks for someone genuinely out of your league and adult bookstores nearby to help you when you strike out yet again.

Well … I think New York would win on that one, too.

What pushed New York into the winners circle, apparently, was the number of people with online dating accounts. The city has more people hitting the web to scratch their various itches than any other city in the country.

The Internet – an airline’s best friend, and their biggest enemy

by Scott Carmichael on

Not much has had a bigger impact on what happens behind the scenes at airlines than the Internet. Just 15 years ago, a flight involved a trip to a travel agent, a call to the airline or one of their now extinct City Ticketing Offices (CTO).

In this article, I’ll take a brief look at how the Internet has helped, and harmed the airlines.

The Internet as their best friend forever

Remotely accessible booking systems had been around for years before the Internet took over – and many of the old online services had some way to sell tickets through their application.

Business travelers and aviation freaks often had access to dial-up booking systems. Those systems were pretty horrible to use, required a complex array of text commands, and were nowhere near as friendly as the current web based booking engines. That said – for geeks, they were awfully cool to use, and booking tickets using them was much more fun than it is nowadays (anyone remember War Games?).

Once airlines learned how to embrace the Internet, they embarked on a one way trip towards getting rid of expensive legacy systems, some of which had been in use since the early 70’s.



The Internet is a one way ride to making a ton of money

Many of the things we used to take for granted are gone – and the Internet is to blame for that. Remember printed ticket stock? Those red carbon prints are gone from most US airlines (they are still used for specialized tickets and many foreign airlines still issue them).

Checking in at the airport used to involve a smile and someone handing you a boarding pass. Nowadays you check in the night before, and print your boarding pass at home. Major airports used to have 30 or 40 staffed desks, now they can handle all their passengers with just 4 or 5 people.

So, it is needless to say that airlines LOVE the Internet. They don’t need thousands of ticket agents, expensive real estate for ticketing offices, and in most cases, the first time you actually deal with an airline employee is when you step up to the gate.

From Internet savings to Internet earnings

Once airlines mastered the art of saving themselves a ton of money, they started to use the Internet to make money. Online check-in has become so popular, that people who don’t use it are being penalized. If you want to get in touch with an old fashioned phone agent to book your ticket, you’ll be charged a fee. United Airlines wants $25 per ticket booked using their phone agents.

The future of the Internet for airlines is simple – everything you want to do, will be done through their online tools. When upstart airline Skybus started flying in 2007, they did not even invest in phone lines – complaints, questions and other queries had to be emailed to them. Of course, they may have been a little ahead of the curve, because they were bankrupt in just 11 months.


The Internet as the enemy

With the proliferation of social networks, the Internet is slowly coming back to bite the airlines in the behind.

Information spreads faster than ever, and news (good and bad) can quickly go “viral”. One example of how the Internet actually hurts their bottom line, is when someone discovers a fare mistake.

Fat finger deals

Even though airlines use more technology than ever behind the scenes, a lot of the processes are still supported by real people. And anywhere people are involved, someone is eventually going to screw up (badly).

Airlines work with thousands of airfares – every single city pair has a long list of fare codes, specific dates for those fares and hundreds of other pieces of data. A “fat finger deal” happens when someone sitting behind a computer mistypes – instead of expecting customers to pay $500 for a flight, they’ll load it for $50, or $5. In other cases, an airline may forget to charge additional fees.

Recently, a large airline loaded 100’s of fares to Europe, but forgot to include the fuel surcharge. In the past, it would take quite some time for travelers to discover this, and even if they did, it would probably only make it to a couple of their friends through email.

Nowadays when something like this happens, someone discovers it right away, and in a matter of minutes the news is being shared with millions of people.

When you can fly to Europe for just $250 all in, news travels very fast. Services like the popular Farecompare can find out of the ordinary airfares within minutes, and share them as soon as they discover them.

In the past an airline may have been able to fix its mistake before more than one or two hundred people took advantage of it – nowadays the damages could be in the millions before they even notice something is wrong.

Any PR is good PR no longer applies

The old mantra “any PR is good PR” no longer applies to the Internet. When United Airlines broke the guitar of one of their customers, the guy vowed revenge.

That revenge resulted in a song about how useless United Airlines is, and has been watched by over 4 Million people.

I’ve seen some “specialists” claim that this didn’t really hurt United Airlines, and it is indeed debatable whether a popular Youtube clip can hurt them, but like with many viral clips, this one made the crossover to old school media. I’m pretty sure that is when the United executives started to notice they really screwed up.

Newspapers, TV stations and magazines all devoted some of their coverage to an airline throwing a guitar, breaking it, and being too incompetent to pay for its mistake.

A quick web search shows that almost every TV news station in the country covered this – and there is no denying that this severely hurt the brand name (if it could be damaged any more).

In the past, a seasoned journalist would contact their favorite PR rep at the airline, and ask for an “official statement”. Nowadays, the news is considered old by the time the old school press covers it.

Airlines invested in employees to be hip and interesting on Facebook and Twitter, but now those people suddenly have to learn damage control as people start Tweeting about how horrible the airline is. When one of the trending topics on a social network is “United Sucks”, even the best PR flack won’t be able to put a positive spin on that.