Travel News

Self-described Trump supporter Brandon Straka was removed from an American Airlines flight yesterday after refusing to don a face mask. The incident was tweeted about by Straka himself during and after the incident.

“Customers on this list will lose their travel privileges on United for a duration of time to be determined pending a comprehensive incident review.” It’s about time.

Travel recently crossed the 500k daily passengers mark – a major achievement considering how far it had fallen. We want to know when it will cross the next major threshold: 1 million daily passengers. Take our anonymous survey and call your shot on when we have 1m passengers in the air again.

Struggling car rental company Hertz is now selling big chunks of its rental car inventory for below market value prices. Hertz which recently filed for bankruptcy protection, has been hit especially hard by the travel slowdown and has been trying to move its large and costly rental car fleet off the books by offering deep discounts to buyers.

On Friday, the US Department of Transportation announced it was providing 100 million free face masks for travelers. Masks will be distributed to air, rail and transit passengers as part of the program.

For the first time since COVID-19 nearly obliterated the travel industry (and may yet do) daily travel crossed the 500,000 mark and we are actually a little impressed. Yesterday marked the highest travel day since the pandemic began with 502,209 passengers in the air.

Industry travel organizations are lobbying Congress to pass new legislation which would protect companies from liabilities associated with employees who contract COVID-19 on business travel.

Hotel operations software provider Optii Solutions released new data highlighting the additional costs hotels adhering to new hotel cleaning guidelines will likely bear. These costs are estimated at an additional $130k per year, per hotel and add an extra 3 minutes cleaning time per room.