United’s stock briefly sinks to a penny on accidental republication of 2002 bankruptcy article
Some folks with sell stops got taken to the cleaners yesterday, and someone with a low-ball limit order made a ton of cash. (Not me, alas. For the record, I haven’t invested in any airline stocks, long or short, except for a brief dalliance in 1998.) Shares of UAL Corp. went from $12.16 to $0.01 when a 2002 Chicago Tribune article with the headline “United Files For Bankruptcy” appeared today. With today’s date. Oops. Perhaps we can find a way to blame fuel prices for the error.

Elite beggars staying at five star hotels
A sweep of Abu Dhabi for beggars during the month of Ramadan has found some particularly successful panhandlers staying at some of the city’s top hotels. Clearly, if they’re making the kind of bank that puts them in the Ritz, I’m doing something wrong. Maybe I should have put in that limit order to buy UAUA at a penny.

Boston fires up the juice
Benet Wilson, who admits that she travels with a power strip, reports that Boston’s Logan International Airport has added 520 power outlets and 520 USB ports under terminal seats and tables for you to charge your electronics. The juice isn’t everywhere yet, but you’ll find it at Terminals A, C and E and near Gate 37 in Terminal B. And yes, the airport is looking for companies to sponsor the power outlets, so the juice stays on and free.

But the car already HAD Bondo on it when I rented it!
You gotta appreciate the renter’s moxie here:

The blue Ford Focus left the lot back in June. The renter paid every 30 days until the middle of August. Rental Manager Brittany Aldrich reported it stolen Tuesday and the car showed up the next day damaged, to say the least. But the damage had been “fixed” by the renter, with Bondo and blue spray paint.

Fuel surcharges CAN be reversed
Air France/KLM and El Al are doing the unthinkable: They’re rolling back the fuel surcharges that they tacked on weeks ago. So is Singapore Airlines. Now that oil has slid back, closer to $100 than to $150, the charges were no longer justified. Could you see that sort of thing happening among U.S. airlines? Neither can I. Hmm, that brings us to…

Continental adds a fee for the first checked bag, worsens OnePass program
Citing higher fuel costs, cough cough, Continental has added a $15 fee for those checking their first bag, eliminated the 500-frequent-flyer-mile minimum, reduced elite bonuses, and raised the mileage cost for frequent flyer ticket redemptions on certain routes. What a surprise.

No allergy medication necessary?
Growing trend in hotel rooms: Hypoallergenic rooms. Sure, fine. Of course, it could be directly canceled out by all the scents that hotels are pumping into their public spaces. Can we maybe get some quietly-closing doors first, please? (Yes, I’m flogging that horse again.)

The key to in-room power
Some European and Asian hotels have the presumably eco-friendly but otherwise irritating habit of requiring a key card to be inserted into a power socket in order to release the flow of electricity. However, you don’t need to use your key card — any card will do. Leave your room and charge your laptop with impunity. (via Gridskipper)

Update: Some readers wrote in, asking for more details or photos. Click here to see an example of the card-locked power sockets at a Hong Kong hotel.

Breakin’ all the rules
The Airbus A380 may have been on its American tour this week, but the FAA has certified only 11 airports nationwide as capable of handling the mega-plane. The airports: Anchorage, Denver, Dallas/Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Louisville (cargo only), New York-JFK, Memphis (cargo only), Miami, Ontario (California — cargo only), Orlando, and San Francisco. This means the A380 wouldn’t have been allowed to land at half the airports in the U.S. that it visited this past week. (Note that Chicago O’Hare and Washington Dulles aren’t on that list…)

Transit woes:
The ever-peripatetic Tyler Brûlé gets stuck at Miami Airport and misses his connecting international flight because he’s undergoing a lengthy TSA questioning. Even passengers who aren’t planning to actually enter the United States, and are only transiting, are treated as if they’re entering the country. Frustrating, but largely a function of airport design. Once you’re in the airport, you can easily leave the secure area and enter the country, after all. But the fact that this is the reality of transiting the U.S. makes American ports of entry less and less desirable. Bad for business!

Far stupider: I went through customs and immigration at LAX once on a domestic flight. It’s true! I traveled from Honolulu to Los Angeles, connecting to Newark. Why the passport control? I was flying Air New Zealand HNL-LAX. Domestic flight, but international airline. Idiotic. Almost missed my connection. (Luggage didn’t make it.)

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Upgraded: Electric power at JFK Airport
More power, Scotty! Through an agreement with the Port Authority, Samsung will be installing electrical charging stations in each terminal of New York’s JFK Airport. Each of the 50 8.5-foot poles will have four separate outlets, suitable for charging your laptop or cellphone. (via NewYorkology)

Downgraded: Hilton Suites Phoenix
Opera soprano Alison Trainer is suing Hilton Hotels for subjecting her to a week of bedbugs at the Hilton Suites in Phoenix. “She looks like a piece of wood that has been attacked by termites,” said Trainer’s attorney, Kenneth J. Glassman. But why would she stay in the hotel — or even in the room — for a full week once she started noticing she had multiple bites in the morning?

Ms. Trainer’s roommate at the Hilton Suites Phoenix

Downgraded: Loyalty card kickbacks
Ron Lieber of the Wall Street Journal runs the numbers for his 2006 spending and loyalty point earnings. He values his rewards at $4,850. And that’s DOWN 78% from his previous year’s earnings? Yowza, nice work! But the takeaway: In the past year, it’s gotten harder to get a solid “return” on your credit cards, with banks less and less likely to give 5% rebates on everyday purchases.

Upgraded, I guess: Palmdale, California
Palmdale, 70 miles from Los Angeles, it has added “LA” to its airport name. I always think this renaming of airports to employ the big city’s name amounts to deceptive practice. (”Chicago Rockford International Airport”? Sorry, folks, Rockford isn’t Chicago. It’s 90 miles away.) But the plan seems to have worked, if the goal was to attract airline service and/or reduce load on LAX. (See here for a skeptical account of Palmdale’s chances.) Delta and United are both hoping to start service to the airport.

Upgraded: Avis rental cars; Downgraded: Private time
Avis is working with Autonet Mobile to create in-car mobile wireless hotspots. For $10.95 a day, a unit in the car creates a local hotspot for use with regular wi-fi cards. The signal, in turn, is transmitted along a cellular network to hit the big pipes on the internet. It’s a nice service, if you’re going to be using your laptop from your car. But jeez, do we really need to be THAT accessible?

Downgraded: Snowglobes
Sure, liquids are prohibited. But don’t forget, that includes snowglobes. Sigh.

Downgraded: Flour, sugar, eggs, Philadelphia
Hot tip: If you really need to transport flour through airports, don’t carry it in a condom. But if you DO arrest someone for carrying flour through an airport in condoms, don’t keep her in jail for three weeks, like Philadelphia did. The flour “mule” will sue. And you’ll pay her handsomely. (Thanks to Benet Wilson)

Upgraded: This blog?
Voting for the Bloggies is open. Vote early and often for your favorite blogs, as long as you vote by January 10. Shameless self-promotion aside: May the best blogs win!

Just a few months ago, it seemed that the trend in airports was to remove power outlets from the terminal area, while simultaneously rolling out services like wi-fi, which, obviously, required electricity. Brilliant.

Thankfully, the trend seems to be reversing. Chris Elliott, in the NYT, reports that airports are wising up to the needs both business and leisure travelers who increasingly depend on electronics to make their time in the airport more livable.

Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport recently converted some of its pay phones into free laptop recharging stations. [...] And Eppley Airfield, near Omaha, just wired its snack bar in the north boarding area with new sockets.

Or take Indianapolis, which has gone a step further and gotten a sponsor for their outlets.

Most airports are putting off the installation of sockets until they renovate their terminals, but the awareness of the problem is at least trickling through to airport managers.

But not every airport is on the traveler’s side. Consider the visual evidence, such as these sockets at SFO with locked covers. Obnoxious in their own right: charging stations like this one, which charges $2 per half hour for the privilege of plugging in. What do our $3 to $4.50 per segment landing fees get us, if not the chance to plug in for a few pennies of electricity?

For those looking for free airport power, let me once again plug (sorry) Jeff Sandquist’s Air Power Wiki, the user-built directory of free airport power sockets. Consult it before you spend $2 for a half hour of juice.

Related:
- Power sockets, sponsored by Chase
- New site roundup
- The mystery of the disappearing electrical outlet

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Cleaner airport bathrooms
Airports vow to keep their bathrooms cleaner. Best bathrooms in the country: Fort Smith Regional Airport in Arkansas (pictured), brilliantly described as “conversation-stopping clean.”

Cleaner jets
Hate taking red-eye flights? Now feel guilty taking them, too. New reports indicate they harm the environment more than daytime flights. (Kinda hard to avoid for inter-continental trips…) Help may be on the way, as research progresses on cleaner-burning jet fuel alternatives.

Power up your ‘pod inflight
Ingenious! A company that sells a unit that lets you recharge your iPod or other small electronic device by tapping into your airplane seat’s audio jack! It won’t power your laptop, but still! (via Mobissimo)

Power up with pie
Normally I don’t like to pass along press releases or stuff that the PR firms send to me. It makes me feel dirty, and it makes me want to freshen up at the conversation-stoppingly clean airport bathroom in the Fort Smith Regional Airport. But this one was just too silly to pass up: Starting tomorrow, Four Points by Sheraton hotels will be offering pie in their hotels — free to guests celebrating their birthday, as well as to platinum members of Starwood Preferred Guest. Tomorrow, the pie is free for everyone, it seems. Guerilla marketing hits the streets tomorrow as well, with free pie in New York City. And joining the trend of hotels pumping scents into the air, the chain will start misting their public spaces with the scent of baking apple pie. Why apple pie? They did a survey, and found that it “will spur thoughts of childhood (27 percent), home (39 percent) and holidays (48 percent).” As much as I like apple pie, do you really think it’s a good idea to make road-weary business travelers think longingly of home and carefree youth?

Polls that aren’t about pie
Brown is the new black. And drunks are the new babies. Drunk passengers now eclipse screaming babies as the most hated flying companions. Congratulations, drunk flyers!

Finally, shameless self-promotion
This blog was proudly featured in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, along with Gary Leff, Ed Hasbrouck, and inflighthq. Thanks for the recognition, and a hearty welcome to the new WSJ readers!