Southwest Passenger Told To Cover Up Her Cleavage

by Jessica Festa on



Apparently, there is now a dress code when boarding a flight. A female passenger on a Southwest Airlines flight from Las Vegas to New York on June 5 was told to cover up her cleavage before boarding.

The passenger told the online blog Jezebel, “I didn’t want to let the representative’s Big Feelings about my breasts change the way I intended to board my flight. And lo and behold, the plane didn’t fall out of the sky…my cleavage did not interfere with the plane’s ability to function properly.”

To help smooth things over, the airline is now issuing the woman an apology, as well as a refund for her flight.

Do you think Southwest Airlines was out of line?

Study Reveals Most Contaminated Surfaces In Hotel Rooms

by Jessica Festa on

You may never be able to relax in a hotel room again – not without a lot of antibacterial, anyway. A new study done by the University of Houston, with help from Purdue University and the University of South Carolina, looked into what surface areas in hotel rooms were most contaminated. Their hope was to identify “high-risk items,” to help hotels figure out where to spend the most time cleaning.

While certain obvious items made the list, like the bathroom sink and toilet, less apparent surfaces were also indicated, like the bedside lamp switch. The TV remote was the biggest culprit, while the bed’s headboard, the bathroom door handle and curtain rods were found to have the least amount of bacteria.

“Hoteliers have an obligation to provide their guests with a safe and secure environment,” explains Katie Kirsch, an undergraduate student at the University of Houston who presented the study. “Currently, housekeeping practices vary across brands and properties with little or no standardization industry wide.”

Apparently, the current method used to validate hotel room cleanliness is a simple visual assessment; however, this has been shown to be ineffective. Hopefully, this study will begin pushing hotels to up their sanitation efforts.

[image via counselman collection]

Video Of The Day: Fashion For The Weather

by Elizabeth Seward on

No matter how many times I manage to put together a surprisingly weather-appropriate outfit, I can’t seem to keep tabs on what those outfits are after the day has passed. This affects my travel packing. Warm-weather climates are easy enough to deal with – a bikini, shorts, tanks, sandals and a sundress or two. Simple. Destinations with cooler weather, however, elude me. Do I need my coat or just my sweater? I should have figured this kind of basic life skill out in elementary school, but since I didn’t, there’s an app for that. Cloth is a fashion app enabling users to photograph and upload pictures of their outfits. But now Cloth is tagging outfits with the current weather and archiving them. So the next time you’re traveling to a place with weather you can’t seem to remember how to dress for, Cloth will show you your own fashion for the weather options.

Study Reveals What Travelers Want Most When Flying

by Jessica Festa on

There’s been a lot of talk lately about customer satisfaction and future plans for air travel. To help get to the bottom of what fliers really want, Skyscanner surveyed airline passengers and asked them.

The findings showed:

  • 20% of travelers want capsule-style bunks on flights
  • 18% would like to see soundproof sections for children
  • 8% hope airplanes will soon have kick-proof seats
  • 1 in 20 people surveyed said they wanted transparent floors and ceilings for better views
  • 4% of fliers want a singles section, where they could potentially connect and flirt with a future partner

Some other suggestions travelers have for flights are featuring an on-board cocktail bar, in-flight cinema, massage chairs and free use of iPads, although certain airlines already offer iPads, showers and capsules in business and first class.

What do you hope is in store for the future of air travel?

[photo via Kuster & Wildhaber Photography]

Injured Hiker Sets Remote Norwegian Island On Fire

by Kyle Ellison on

In the classic 1994 outdoor film “The River Wild,” Meryl Streep’s hapless husband manages to create a signal fire to let his kidnapped wife know that he is still alive and planning on staging a rescue effort. Upon seeing the wafting plumes of smoke emanating from the mountainside, this inevitably leads Streep to attempt to paddle a whitewater raft down “The Gauntlet” in an effort to kill Kevin Bacon. By the end of the day, Streep manages to beguile Bacon and thereby saves the life of her son and is reunited with her smoke-sign savvy husband.

This, of course, is the Hollywood version of signal fires.

Back here in reality, however, occasionally you break your foot while hiking on a remote Norwegian island, lie incapacitated in the woods for three days … and then you set the entire mountainside ablaze.

This was exactly the fortune of an unlucky hiker who recently fell and broke his foot while hiking alone on the Norwegian island of Hillesoy. In an article posted by Outside Online, a 25-year-old Canadian man attempted to ignite a signal fire in an effort to call for help; however, the fire quickly engulfed his tent and led to the blaze spreading across the forested island.

Though the man was rescued by authorities and transported to a nearby hospital, two army helicopters and 20 firefighters were needed to douse the flames, which incinerated much of the island’s foliage. Hillesoy is home to nearly 800 people, and luckily it has not been reported that the blaze affected any of the island’s residents.

While setting a blaze of this magnitude is considered illegal in Norway, considering the circumstances officials claim that the man will not be facing any charges.

[Image credit: andrusdevelopment on Flickr]