Gulliver

STEFANI GERMANOTTA, otherwise known as Lady Gaga, caused a bit of a stir at Los Angeles International airport last week. The pop star walked through airport security wearing what the Daily Mail described as "very little, and a pair of handcuffs at her waist." (The Mail has photos, of course.) But there's no law against wearing a skimpy outfit to the airport—and as the Transportation Security Administration's "Blogger Bob" explained on Wednesday, the handcuffs aren't a problem, either:

They’re not a threat. You can’t do any real damage with a pair of handcuffs and if you really wanted to tie someone’s hands behind their back, there are many other ways you could do it. I’m sure you’re thinking of a few right now. Speaking of tying things together, I’d like to tie the prohibited items list into this post. It’s one of the most popular TSA related searches out there, so I thought I’d let you in on our cool new mobile/web tool.

Our new MyTSA App (Available as an iPhone App or Mobile Web App) amongst other great features has a "Can I Bring My…" tool. You can type in the name of the item you’re curious about and it will tell you if the item is permitted or not. If it’s not included in the list, you have the option of submitting it to us for addition. We even added “tatting shuttle.” Yep, we had to Google it too and they are permitted)

Just so you know, you don’t have to have a mobile device, "Can I Bring My…" is also on the web.

This is great, useful stuff—really unusual for the TSA. What's the most interesting or weirdest item you've ever brought on a plane? What about the most interesting outfit you've seen? Let us know in the comments.

FANFARE, please: Virgin is to enter the hotel industry. The group has set aside some $500m, and is looking for properties with between 150 and 400 rooms. By concentrating initially on American cities such as New York, San Francisco, Miami, Boston and Los Angeles, it hopes to have a first four-star hotel running inside two years, and 25 open by 2017.

The Virgin Hotels website provides a little bit of information, clarifying that the group is seeking opportunities in various guises, either as third-party manager, owner or partner. It also describes the target guest market as the "high income, well-educated, metropolitan 'creative class'". Just the kind of guests everyone else wants, in other words.

What are Virgin's chances of success? Given the business skills and glitzy suavity of its boss, Sir Richard Branson, one would have to rate them pretty high. And the skills the company has honed in running airlines and airport lounges should translate in some useful way to the hotel industry. But I wonder whether Virgin will find it harder than usual to differentiate itself from its competitors. With its trains and its planes, Virgin has frequently been able to shake up a hidebound industry and offer better service. Is that so easy with hotels? After all, at the four-star end of the market and higher, service is not generally a problem.

I'm no branding expert, but I also wonder if the Virgin brand will tempt people to spend money on an expensive hotel. Does Virgin have sufficiently aspirational connotations to persuade people away from W Hotels, Andaz and the like, which have rather more boutique cachet?

Still, the hotels will obviously benefit from tie-ins with the Virgin Group's airlines and from the fact that they are part of the travel world where the company has made its name. The strapline is the vaguely predictable “Fancy getting into bed with Virgin?”. I suspect enough people will.

THERE'S a nice post on Gadling that corrals together a selection of quotations (although by no means the "top ten" claimed) relating to the world of travel. My favourite comes from Alain de Botton:

We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn... that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery.

Duly inspired, I head towards better lists, such as this and this. They both contain the following splendid quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson, which I remember, vaguely, from childhood. "For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move." Does that offer inspiration for the business travellers enduring a four-hour layover? Well, not every time.

When you've had enough of the smugness of travellers pointing out that they're not tourists, and wanderers realising that they have found what they were looking for at home, etc, have a read of this alternative list. It contains this particularly bon mot:

Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I tweeted my followers to ask which I should take.

THINGS are looking up for the world’s airlines, according to the latest profit forecasts from the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the industry’s main trade group. IATA now predicts annual profits across the industry of $8.9 billion in 2010, more than three times the $2.5 billion it was predicting in June, and a far cry from the $2.8 billion loss projected in March.

This suggests (that IATA’s forecasting tools are not as sharp as they might be, and) that aviation has recovered faster from the financial crisis than expected, with cargo markets proving particularly strong.

The single profit figure hides some stark regional differences. Asian carriers are expected to record profits above $5 billion. And American carriers will continue to reap the benefits of the capacity cuts they introduced in 2008 to record profits of £3.5 billion. But Europe will remain in the red, albeit with $1.3 billion losses well below June’s prediction of $2.8 billion.

With airline revenues projected to reach $560 billion this year, the industry is tottering towards a profit margin of 1.6%. Still, it's probably time for a quick cheer, as the expectations for 2011 are worse. This year is "as good as it gets", according to Giovanni Bisignani, the head of IATA. "Unemployment remains high and business confidence is weakening," he said. "And we expect the 3.2% GDP growth of 2010 to drop to 2.6% in 2011. As a result, 2011 is looking more austere. We see profitability falling to $5.3 billion with a margin of 0.9%."

And with capacity (for cargo and passengers combined) due to grow faster than demand, next year, airline chiefs could have some worrying days ahead.

TAKEOFF delays can be a real bummer. But some people know how to make the best of bad situations. Take this group on a September 2 KLM flight from Shanghai to Amsterdam:

According to the blog Airlines and Destinations, the 22 members of the Amsterdam Sinfonietta had just wrapped up a tour of China and were on their way home after playing at the National Centre of Performing Arts in Beijing and at the Dutch Culture Centre at the Shanghai 2010 World Expo. Eventually, they got tired of just sitting in their seats, waiting for takeoff, and launched into Mozart's Symphony No. 29. Apparently, the delay ended soon after they finished playing. 

I have never experienced a 747 concert myself, so I have some questions. What are the acoustic effects of playing in a long metal tube? I know the Amsterdam Sinfonietta is a chamber orchestra. But a 747 is an odd "chamber." How much notice did the members of the orchestra give the flight crew before they broke out their instruments and started playing? And what about the passengers? Sure, most of them probably appreciated something to break the monotony of a long flight delay. But who will speak for the Mozart-haters?

(h/t The Consumerist)

Air New Zealand is the airline of choice for those who like their safety videos medium-wacky. Last year we got excited about the carrier’s body-paint film. And it recently put together a version involving members of the All Blacks, the country’s national rugby team, and a few weak rugby-related word plays. So that’s team talks, front rows, stretching your hammies and “crouch, touch, embrace”. Non-Kiwis should not worry overly if the references pass them by: the video is intended for use on domestic services only. But as a rugby fan himself, Gulliver would say that it's better than most.

THE Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) is proposing a new slate of regulations to combat pilot fatigue. About time, too. Last year the National Transportation Safety Board identified pilot fatigue as a possible cause of the crash of Colgan Air 3407 in February 2009 near Buffalo, New York, that killed 50 people. The FAA has had a proposal to combat pilot fatigue on the books since 1995, and this has now been withdrawn in favour of the new one. That's a long time to know a problem exists without doing a lot to solve it, even for a government agency.

According to the FAA proposal, pilots should rest for a minimum of nine hours before flying-related duty, instead of eight. And companies must establish a new method for measuring that rest period to give pilots a chance to receive at least eight hours of sleep. They should also cut daily flight duty (which will be defined as when a pilot “reports for duty with the intention of flying an aircraft, operating a simulator or operating a flight training device”) from 16 hours to 13. Pilots will also get at least 30 consecutive hours per week free from all duty, instead of the 24 they currently receive. Smaller limits on monthly and yearly flight times were also proposed.

The public will have 60 days to comment on the provisions in the proposal, and the FAA will issue a regulation no later than August 1st 2011. We hope the FAA will have something in place before then. But given the case of ex-JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater, perhaps the agency should also revisit fatigue issues for all flight crew.

AMERICA'S National Transportation Safety Board recommended in a report last month that all passengers should be properly restrained in separate seats. That sounds perfectly reasonable until you realise that the only people who don't have their own seats are children under the age of two. Both the US Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) and Transport Canada have looked at adopting such a rule in the past and rejected it, just as they probably will this time. Good for them. Having travelled several times across the Atlantic with babies (well-behaved ones at that) on board a few different carriers, the thought of paying full fare for a passenger who will spend most of the flight on her parents' laps strikes me as a tad ridiculous. Especially since even older kids positively swim in their seats, seat belt or not. Indeed, the extra cost is one reason why the FAA ultimately turned down a similar recommendation in 2005. It noted that the added cost might force people to give up flying in favour of driving, which is a "statistically more dangerous way to travel".

The safety board made the recommendation after reviewing a crash in Butte, Montana in March 2009 that killed the pilot and all 13 passengers, including seven children between the ages of one and nine. Not to belabour the point, and with all due respect, it's worth reiterating that nobody survived, so it wouldn't have mattered whether the kids had their own seats. Despite the opposition to its idea, the board will hold a public forum on December 9th to address the safety of children travelling in aeroplanes and cars. Its heart, at the very least, is in the right place, but perhaps designing a proper and comfortable restraint system for all children would be a better place to start.

THERE was a good little rant from Tyler Brûlé in the weekend’s Financial Times about hotels and their hypocrisy in environmental matters. What gets Mr Brûlé’s goat is the way so many lodgings like to promote their "eco" credentials, when this often means little more than saving water by asking guests not to have their towels cleaned every day.

Yet these same hotels have a tendency to ignore much more obvious environmental crimes: the massive rounds of redecorating that they unleash every couple of years.

There’s a very good chance that the hotel room for which you’re paying upwards of €500 a night has a lifespan of not longer than four years, and in extreme cases the whole thing (wardrobe, writing desk, side tables and club chairs) will get carted off to a dumpster in under two years.

Read the whole article.

MINT.COM is an excellent (and free) personal finance site that launched in September 2007. You probably already know the story: Mint's intuitive, useful, and great-looking interface gained it a huge loyal following in just two years. By 2009, when it was bought by Intuit (the maker of Quicken) for $170 million in cash, it was already tracking $200 billion in transactions and $50 billion in assets. Anyway, you should consider using Mint. 

One of the tricks Mint uses to increase its user base is writing useful, informative posts on its blog, MintLife. Most of the posts are exactly the sorts of things that take off on social media and hit the front page of sites like Digg. On Friday, the site had a particularly useful post on tipping abroad—a subject near and dear to Gulliver's heart. Here's the section for the UK:

As someone who lived in the UK for a little while, I can attest that adjusting to a new tipping culture can leave us feeling a little in the dark. The rules here are closer to American tipping etiquette than more far-flung locales, though they are still a wee bit lower. About 10% to 15% at restaurants is polite and expected unless you see a "discretionary service charge" of around 12% at the bottom of your bill. (This means they’ve included it in for you.) The going tipping rate for a night in a pub is a pound or two left with your bill at the end of the night. Add 10% for taxis and a few pounds for tour guides and porters.

Does that sound accurate? What about the advice for Japan ("in very poor taste") and China ("officially discouraged")? The problem with these sorts of hard-and-fast rules is that with tipping, context is everything. Workers at a fancy, western-style resort, even in a no-tipping country, generally expect tips. But not every American cabdriver expects 15%—or even 10%. It depends on the city—and the cabbie. 

Mint's page of reader responses on tipping in America is worth a read, too. Readers, what are your tipping rules? Do we have any no-tippers in the crowd? What about frequent 25-percenters? (They're more common than you might think, especially among former waitstaff in America.) Let us know in the comments.

THE soon-to-open London outpost of the W Hotel chain is looking for a hard-core socialite. It wants to hire a “W Insider” who will be a particularly 21st-century concierge able to tell guests what is hot and what is not on the city’s food, music and entertainment scene. The job description is for "a pearly social king or queen - every week is fashion week - who can access all areas, swing open locked doors, take our guests behind the velvet rope, bring Soho to a stand-still or simply make it stop raining."

I score 0/5 on those requirements, but then I don't really feel that W Hotels would want me to apply. Maybe I'm a youngish fogey (okay, full disclosure: I am), but the presence of an employee whose job is to help guests get into exclusive clubs is not something that really attracts me to a hotel. Then again, the allure of W Hotels in general has always seemed slightly opaque. It's a chain where restaurants are known as “contemporary restaurant concepts” and shops as “stylish retail concepts”, and whose whole ethos is of “an innovative, contemporary, design-led lifestyle brand”. Trouble is, that's the kind of branding that leads me to worry whether my shoes would have everyone on the reception team sniggering behind their impeccably manicured hands.

I do wonder, though, whether this new hotel will be quite the bastion of cool that W Hotels implies. Specifically, it's the location that's a concern. The W is in Leicester Square, for heaven's sake, a place that's ideal if you want to watch 50 Italian teenagers flirting by a ticket booth or get a cartoon caricature drawn as tourists stare. But it's rather less suitable if you want to step out into the heart of chic London. Perhaps the hotel will trigger the rebirth of cool in this rather unprepossessing part of the capital. But if it doesn't, this could end up being the "W" in "wrong".

DOMINIC LAWSON offers fervent applause to Schiphol airport in Amsterdam for the way he was treated there. Much to his eventual surprise, he arrived back in Britain on the day originally intended, despite turning up at the airport without his recently lost passport.

...the Dutchwoman at the BA counter was all smiles and sympathy, and called the representative of the UK Border Agency.
Most unusually, there is such a person permanently based at Schiphol; in other countries, one would have to travel to the British consulate, which in the Netherlands would have meant a trip to The Hague, and  -  it was already evening  -  goodbye to any chance of leaving that day.

Fortunately, I was able to give the man from the UK Border Agency the number of my missing passport, which he fed into his computer, and after asking various questions to test my knowledge of my own claimed identity, he told me he was prepared to escort me through passport control.

That sounds fantastically simple, and confirms the familiar tip that you should take a photocopy of your passport with you when you travel. And Mr Lawson's day of wonder continued, with a kindly taxi driver, and no fee demanded for changing his flight. Even the subsequent loss of his boarding pass (it would be fair to say this was not the journalist's finest day) was no impediment to the smooth running of the Schiphol machine.

All of which leads me to throw out a couple of questions. Is this all standard fare at Schiphol? Has any reader been wowed by customer service there recently? And has anyone lost their passport/identity card and managed an easier return home than Mr Lawson's across an international border?