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Downgraded: Hotel-room glasses
I’m always a little wary of those glasses in hotel rooms, but now we’ve got hidden-camera proof that we shouldn’t be using them — or washing them ourselves before every use. Fox Atlanta planted cameras in several hotels, including Holiday Inn, Sheraton, and the Ritz-Carlton. In each hotel, housekeepers don’t remove the glasses for cleaning in the dishwashers downstairs. At best, they simply rinse them. At worst, they spray them with poisonous household cleaners, handle them with the same gloves they wore when cleaning the toilet, or dry the rinsed glassware with the same towel you used as a bathmat that morning. Disgusting. (Thanks, James!)

Upgraded: Ways to contact Skybus
Skybus, the notoriously hard-to-reach airline that tries to tell its customers that there’s no working phone number at the airline, has been exposed. How to contact Skybus, according to Skybus? Write an e-mail. After seeing far too many boilerplate e-replies that don’t address the problem, Chris Elliott has posted the executives’ contact information, including e-mails.

Upgraded: Advertisers’ unwitting sense of irony
Skybus again: CapitalOne is shelling out the big bucks to paint pigs all over a Skybus A319. It’s a savings account ad — a piggy bank theme — plus a riff off “When pigs fly,” leaving you, the consumer, with hijinks and hilarity. But if you’re an airline, do you really want your plane looking like a pig? Skybus, the flying pig? Wallow aboard!

Upgraded: Paris wine
Where to find a good wine bar or wine retailer in Paris? Look no further. Dr. Vino hits the scene with yet another installation of his wine maps. The Paris wine map features both stores and bars.

Upgraded: Getting on the bump list
The Cranky Flier notes that United has started asking for volunteers on overbooked flights at the time of check-in. Talk about getting in front of the problem. Unfortunately, the net effect for travelers is negligible, because you can’t (yet?) be guaranteed a bump by registering for one online. You still have to drag your butt to the airport and wait at the gate. Registering online only gets you an early spot on the list, if that’s your bag.

Upgraded: Smokin’ hot suitcases
The joke luggage insert (ahem, the Citizen’s Insertable Swiftness Manifest) posted last week included several jokes about smoking luggage. Now life imitates art. Phoenix SkyHarbor Airport was actually shut down after a smoking suitcase was discovered.

(image)

Google, either encouraging physical fitness or zero population growth, offers the above helpful suggestion when mapping the route from Chicago to London.

Click the image for a larger screenshot, or see here for the full directions and map of the route.

29 days, 22 hours to get there? Maybe I will fly after all.

Update: Google took it down. But the reason for the joke may be this:

Benoît Lecomte is a long distance swimmer from France born in 1967 who was the first man to swim across the Atlantic Ocean in 1998. He did this to raise money for cancer research as a tribute to his father. During his 3,716 mile journey in 73 days, he was followed by a support boat that had an electromagnetic field for 25 feet to ward off sharks. He did, however, still encounter sea turtles, dolphins, and jellyfish.

The feat, performed in 1998, took him 72 days, with 6-8 hours spent swimming each day in sessions of about two hours length. He was accompanied by associates in a boat, where he could rest and eat between each swimming period. The swim extended from Hyannis, Massachusetts to Quiberon, Brittany, France. He stopped for 1 week in the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean. He achieved the goal in 72 days, and took lots of practice to get across. He had many fans once he reached land. Lecomte is now looking forward to swimming across the Pacific Ocean to the Phillipines.

The instructions on getting to London (or anywhere else in Europe for that matter) all involved getting into the water in Massachusetts, and getting out in Brittany. Mystery solved!

(via Gadling)

Everyone knows that you can map your driving route using MapQuest or Google Maps. No surprises there. But beyond simply telling you where to go, there are more and more so-called “mashups” that combine maps with other travel-relevant information. Consider:

• Heading to the airport? Find the cheapest airport parking lot first.

• Want to know the route you’ll fly? Run the airport codes through the Great Circle Mapper to see the shortest flight route between cities.

• Prefer to track flights in real-time and see where they are on a map? Try FlightAware for US-based flights or AeroSeek for many (not all) international flights.

• How about your hotel? TripAdvisor, which collects reviews from people around the web, has started mapping hotels and lets you sort them by “popularity” rating.

• If you’re a Priceline user who bids for your hotel room, check out BetterBidding.com’s hotel maps, which list the hotels people have actually won in the auction, as well as the prices they paid, in major American cities.

• Finally, when you get to a city, how about a good restaurant or wine bar? Or even better: a good liquor store and a BYOB restaurant! You’re in luck if you’re traveling to New York or Chicago: Annotated maps of New York wine shops and wine bars, and Chicago wine shops and BYOB restaurants.

Got other interesting map combinations of interest to travelers? Post about it in comments!

Related:
- Getting more accurate flight tracking
- World travel, graphically

Parking at the airport? Before you automatically grab a ticket at the airport’s official parking lot, consider the site AboutAirportParking. The site uses Google Maps to show the locations of the various airport area parking sites, with information on pricing, links to the lot operator, etc.

The site allows users to write reviews of parking facilities. On the downside, the information is limited to airports in the United States for the time being. Frequency of shuttles to the airport would be a nice feature to include, too.

Since many lots are at hotels, also consider ParkSleepFly.com, the directory of airport hotels with long-term parking packages, which I mentioned recently.

(via GoogleMapsMania, thanks to reader THC!)
tags: travel | airport parking

The Geeky Traveller points to a neat map of world tourism. Country size on the map is modified to proportionally represent the number of tourists traveling there: More tourists, bigger image on the map, making France look larger than Australia. It’s a visually interesting representation.

The original source for the maps, Worldmapper, offers some other equally interesting travel-related maps. Tourist origins, gross cash receipts from tourism, tourism profit, aircraft passengers, and rail passengers are all pretty interesting. But there are plenty more. Geek out.

tags: travel | air travel | tourism | maps