The most recent episode of the wonderful “Fly with Me” podcast dealt with people behaving badly on flights. The host of the show Joe Dion, a commercial airline pilot, remarked that when you think about how unnatural a commercial flight is with so many people crammed so close together in a pressurized metal tube 6 miles up it is amazing how usually things go so smoothly, but sometimes they don’t as Joe’s latest podcast describes. I thought of that podcast when I saw this story in the USA Today:

Man gets jail time, ordered to pay JetBlue $2,867 for disrupted flight

A JetBlue passenger was sentenced to 10 months in prison for threatening the airline’s flight attendants after they stopped serving him alcohol, The Buffalo News reports. The 27-year-old man apparently became “belligerent” with the attendants after they cut him off. He then “made several statements about shooting and killing the crew” once the plane landed, according to The Associated Press. The threats and poor behavior led JetBlue to divert its Houston-to-New York JFK flight to Buffalo, where the man was removed from the plane by the FBI. JetBlue’s crewmembers told authorities they stopped serving the man because he was obviously intoxicated.

Just in case we are unclear about the proper standards of behavior when flying commercially, let’s just say that threatening the crew is not something I am going to recommend.

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I have mentioned Kayak.Kayak.com before as one of my favorite sites to use for booking air travel. Kayak sent out a reminder of how to save money booking holiday travel that is worth passing along. If you specify that your dates are flexible (you must create an account to use this feature) you can bring up a graph that will help you pick the best day to fly.

It pays to know what others are paying. After doing a flight search, check the airfare history for a desired route by clicking on Chart View on the flight results page. Kayak’s Best Fare Trend Graph charts pricing for city/date pairs found by Kayak.com users over the past 90 days.

This chart will:

1. Let you know if the deal you are looking at is a good deal
2. Let you know if you might get a better deal by moving your trip a few days

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Remember back when you used to get a meal on your flight? Heck, remember when you used to get peanuts? Well some airlines on some flights still offer meals and the site AirlineMeals.net documents meals that travelers have been served. The meal above was served, for example, in Business Class on a Continental airline flight. It looks like an improvement over the meals I have gotten in couch. You know the type. “Excuse me miss, did I get the chicken or the fish? I can’t tell”

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I booked and paid for a room using Hotwire.com last weekend and then ended up paying for a second hotel room. Why? It turns out that there is a catch with the HotWire service that you should know about.

If you are not familiar with HotWire.com it is a site that sells unsold hotel rooms at a significant discount. It is similar to the better known Priceline.com. With Priceline you bid for what price you are willing to pay (which is a hassle). With HotWire they will tell you what price you can pay for a hotel that is rated a certain number of stars with particular set of amenities. Neither site tells you the name of the hotel before you pay for a pre-payed, non-refundable room. On HotWire you choose a general geographic area, decide if you need the pool at a 3 star hotel or if the 2 star hotel with free internet is what you want.

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VeniceHotel.org has a great feature for those traveling to Venice in the very near future. It has a forecast for which days will have the biggest crowds. I assume they are predicting this using bookings at hotels in the area. The only catch is that the forecast only goes out for 21 days. But, for instance, if you are planning on going in the next 3 weeks (which includes carnival) and you wanted to avoid the biggest crowds (did I mention carnival) then they recommend avoiding February 2nd.

Thanks to Italy from the Inside for finding this gem.

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