Last week I was travelling (hence the sparseness of posts), or dealing with the inevitible aftermath of travel on workload. In respect of that, here are a few lunchtime news chum items related to travel:
- Merger Woes. Last week I flew on United, which is currently in the process of dealing with the merger with Continental. Two articles highlighted just how complicated such a merger is, going down to the minutae of how one slices limes or how many bowling balls can be checked.
- Flyaway Home. If you’ve ever flown to LAX and needed to get out to Van Nuys, you know what a bargain the LAX Flyaway is. But some routes are not as well used as others: for example, the Westwood route averages only 7 passengers per bus. As a result, the Flyaway is running a $4.6M deficit. Of course, this news comes as the Flyaway is planning to add more new routes—Long Beach, Valencia, and eventually Santa Monica and Culver City—as part of a mandate to expand Flyaway to reduce airport traffic. Of course, I could have told them Westwood would be a failure—they tried it once before in the early 1980s and it failed.
- Recycling a Hotel. USA Today has an article about a ghost hotel—specifically, a former Raddison in Delaware—that has been sitting vacant for 10 years. It seems they built it too big, and thus it was never permitted for occupancy. It has finally been purchased as in being converted to a Sheraton, and crews from Habitat for Humanity are going in to rip out fixtures, granate countertops, doors, lights, etc., to be sold in their resale shop to fund their efforts. They are finding a brand new hotel, frozen in time. Interesting read.
