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BAY COUNTY, Fla. (WJHG/WECP) – Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport (ECP) announces brand new non-stop weekend service next summer on United Airlines to Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD) starting June 8.
“ECP is excited to announce United Airlines will now service non-stop to Chicago (ORD) on weekends next summer,” said Parker McClellan, Jr., airport Executive Director. “This new non-stop service adds to our impressive lineup of enhanced summer service and is meeting the demands of our passengers during peak travel months.”
The new Chicago flights in and out of ECP were among 11 summer routes United announced nationwide in a press release last week.
All ECP airline partners including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Southwest Airlines are increasing flight activity or adding larger aircraft through the 2019 summer season.
Information on all flight markets can be found by visiting iflybeaches.com, featuring airline ticket links to directly book a flight.
Flight schedules are subject to change.
Traveling by plane isn’t always comfortable. Often times it can be cramped, or the temperature isn’t right, or you’re sitting in a noisy area.
But if you’re traveling this holiday season, keep in mind there are places to sit on the plane that are more optimal than other seats, says a flight attendant.
Best place to sit if you’re always cold:
If you hate being cold on a flight, do not sit next to the emergency exit windows. The outside air seeps in the most in those seats.
Best place to sit if you hate loud noise:
Planes are notoriously loud, but if you need more of a quiet seat, chose one that’s away from the kitchen, where the flight attendants work most.
Best place to sit if you want a lot of leg room:
I think we’re all guilty of propping our feet up on the seat in front of us, because we’re cramped. So, if you want a lot of leg room, chose the bulkhead seats, the seats right after the cabin divider or the emergency exit window seats.
Best place to sit if you hate turbulence:
Turbulence on a flight is never fun, and if you get anxious, sit closer to the front of the plane. That way you won’t feel the bumpiness as much as you would in the back.
Depending on the flight experience you’re looking for, a great website to check out before booking your next flight is called Seat Guru, where you can browse seat maps to over 1,100 aircrafts.
Someone over at Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen’s marketing department has a sick sense of humor. For Philly fliers, the fast food chain is offering “Emotional Support Chicken” which are specially-marked, chicken-shaped carrier boxes filled with, yep, fried chicken.
The box reads:
This chicken provides comfort and nourishment during stressful air travel. Unlike other chicken, it is marinated in real Louisiana spices for 12 hours and must be permitted to fly without restriction. Do not leave unattended, as Popeyes’ is not responsible for lost or stolen chicken.
From its press release:
Emotional support animals provide comfort and companionship, especially during a highly stressful time like air travel. However, according to recent headlines, some travelers are pushing the envelope with the types of animals they try to bring on flights and classify as “emotional support animals,” including the likes of peacocks, squirrels and tarantulas. Knowing this, Popeyes decided to launch its new “Emotional Support Chicken” to bring holiday travelers some humor to what is one of the most stressful places to be during the holidays – the airport.
“Emotional Support Chicken” is ONLY available at the Gate C31 Popeyes in the Philadelphia airport.
image via Popeyes
(Cosmo)
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United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz had just finished working out at home when his knees buckled.
He remembers thinking, “That was weird.” But he recalled the words of a doctor friend who had warned him not to ignore seemingly odd symptoms that could indicate heart problems.
Munoz dialed 911. He then broke his nose stumbling to unlock the front door so the paramedics could come in.
A few months later, in January 2016, Munoz had a new heart beating in his chest.
Munoz runs one of the world’s largest airlines. But on Monday, the 59-year-old wasn’t at United’s Chicago headquarters or on a plane. He was sitting alongside others who had also undergone heart transplants at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. They gathered as Northwestern doctors announced that this year they’ve broken the record for performing the most heart transplants ever at an Illinois hospital in one year.
With less than two weeks left in 2018, doctors have transplanted 54 hearts this year, besting the previous record of 45 heart transplants set by Rush University Medical Center in 1995, according to Northwestern.
“The accomplishment is a reflection (that) there’s more patients in Chicago that are receiving the type of care that they ought to be receiving,” said Dr. Allen Anderson, medical director of the Center for Heart Failure at Northwestern’s Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute.
Illinois hospitals have performed 167 heart transplants this year — up from 139 last year — according to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. Nationally, doctors have performed more than 3,100 heart transplants so far this year.
In recent years, it’s become easier to get donor hearts, Allen said. That’s partly because of an increase in the number of people dying from opioid overdoses, and a result of changes to the national system for allocating organs. Also, people with hepatitis C may now be organ donors thanks to advances in the ability to cure the disease.
Demand for hearts, however, continues to outstrip supply. In Illinois, 215 people are waiting for heart transplants.
Dr. Duc Thinh Pham, the Northwestern center’s surgical director, called donating a heart “the most selfless decision anyone could make.”
Munoz said he doesn’t yet know the identity of his heart donor, but he hopes to one day. “Three years ago, around Christmas, I was here and I was given a gift of, in essence, life,” Munoz said at a news conference.
Munoz’s heart troubles came as a surprise to him. He was a marathon runner, a triathlete and a vegan.
“This is why symptoms matter so much,” Munoz said. “It’s genetic in a lot of people, and it was with me.”
After that heart attack in October 2015, Munoz was in a coma for about a week and got a type of pump known as a left ventricular assist device. He was ultimately added to the list of people waiting for hearts.
On the morning of his birthday in January 2016, Anderson, with Northwestern, phoned him.
“Allen called and said, ‘Have we got a kick-ass heart for you,’” Munoz recalled.
He went to work the morning of his transplant and attended a meeting. At lunch time, he excused himself from the office. His co-workers didn’t know he was headed to Northwestern for the transplant.
“As a public company CEO, I went through the whole gamut of privacy — you need to know, you need to tell everybody everything, to minding for my family, and my wife and kids,” Munoz said.
Munoz’s recovery went smoothly, and he returned as CEO in March of 2016. But he knows not everyone is as fortunate.
“For every one of us that is saved by the things we heard about today, unfortunately, there are many that aren’t,” Munoz said. That’s part of the reason he’s traveled the world telling his story since his transplant, to raise awareness about the signs of heart attacks.
“I don’t think I’ll ever ever get tired of telling this story and, more importantly, I’ll never get tired of thanking folks,” Munoz said.
A number of other heart transplant patients also shared their stories Monday to help Northwestern celebrate the milestone.
Ralph Nuti, of St. Charles, said he could barely walk 20 feet before he got the same kind of pump as Munoz and ultimately a heart transplant three months ago. Nuti had endured decades of heart problems.
Nuti, 61, said he’s now enjoying his grown children and young grandchildren.
“Before, I’d be sitting in a chair and I couldn’t do a lot with them,” Nuti said. “Now, we’re going to the arboretum to see the light fest and we’re taking my older one out to go shopping.”
It’s a life-changing surgery for those who undergo it, Anderson said.
“There are no perfect therapies in this world, but for the right people (heart transplant) is a proven therapy that allows people to return to their lives,” Anderson said. “That might be playing with their grandchildren, watching their children get married, or running a Fortune 500 company.”
The hospital with the next highest number of heart transplants this year was University of Chicago Medical Center, with 38. Loyola University Medical Center had 28.
lschencker@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @lschencker
To rub that fact in our faces before the holiday travel season, Genfare, a company that offers fare solutions to transit agencies, conducted a survey of 2,000 Americans who fly at least twice per year to determine the worst offenses when it comes to flying.
According to the survey, 64% said it’s okay to take their shoes off on a plane, which is somehow fine if they slip them back on before using the bathroom. Things really fall apart, though, over this statistic: 20% of you monsters out there thinks it’s perfectly okay to take your socks off on a plane. It’s not. No one wants to be sitting next to someone while they lift their knee up to their face to peel their socks off in the confined space of an airline seat. Plus, when the socks come off, odor is sure to waft, and 26% of those surveyed said that the inescapable scent of body odor was the biggest plane travel annoyance.
The No. 1 spot, though, was saved for something universally agreed upon as completely aggravating: seat kicking. Among those surveyed, 54% said that was the most annoying thing (probably because they forgot about the barefoot traveler spreading their toe jam all over the shared floor space). The next biggest aggravation was being trapped on a plane with a crying child (27%), which went hand in hand with inattentive parents (21%).
Here’s the full list of air travel annoyances, ranked:
Luckily, survey respondents had plenty of remedies to combat No. 4 on the list—talkative passengers. In fact, 3% of those surveyed just ignore them. Most people, though, exited those uninvited conversations by putting on headphones (37%) or looking at their phones (13%), while my personal heroes were the 0.5% who called the flight attendant to make the passenger stop talking to them.
CLOSE
Sculptors carved a knight, a dragon, a discus thrower, a heart with wings and more out of ice during the 12 annual Ithaca Ice Fest.
Matt Steecker, ithacajournal.com | @MSteecker
United Airlines is adding a third daily flight between Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport and Washington Dulles International Airport.
The new flight to Washington, D.C., is scheduled to begin on April 29, a United Airlines news release stated. Tickets are now available for purchase.
“Ithaca is a vital economic centerpiece for business and tourism in upstate New York, and United Airlines is proud to offer customers the only non-stop service between Washington, D.C., and Ithaca,” said Jill Kaplan, United Airlines’ president of New York and New Jersey. “The addition of a third daily flight to our schedule offers our customers more choice and convenience to travel between Ithaca and Washington-Dulles.”
The flights to Dulles are scheduled on 50-passenger jets, and are an hour and 20 minutes in duration. Current flights leave from Ithaca at 6 a.m. and 2:30 p.m., and they depart Washington Dulles at 12:30 and 5:30 p.m.
A preliminary schedule shows the third flight will leave from Ithaca at 7:20 p.m. and will depart Washington at 10:10 p.m.
“I’m very excited — but not surprised — that it took only a few months for our community to show that we’d make great use of United’s convenient nonstop service between Ithaca and Washington, D.C.,” said Martha Robertson, chair of the Tompkins County Legislature.
United’s service between Ithaca and Washington Dulles replaced service between Ithaca and Newark Liberty International Airport in October.
Washington Dulles provides flights from more than 30 carriers. From Washington Dulles, United offers flights to more than 70 cities across the U.S. and nearly 40 destinations in Asia, Europe and Latin America.
“Cornell University is thrilled by today’s announcement by United Airlines,” said Joel M. Malina, Cornell’s vice president for university relations. “Many of our faculty and staff engage with federal policymakers on a regular basis, and having an additional daily flight from Dulles to Ithaca will make day trips to our nation’s capital more feasible.”
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United Airlines announced Wednesday it will be adding 11 new summer routes from its hubs in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. in June 2019.
The new flights will help connect United passengers to popular summer vacation destinations in California, Colorado, Florida, Oregon, Michigan and Nova Scotia. Tickets for the seasonal service are now available for purchase.
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The additional United flights are part of the airline’s 78 domestic routes announced in 2018 and build on the carrier’s record network expansion, including offering seven new routes from O’Hare International Airport in Chicago to Colorado, Florida, Oregon and Nova Scotia.
“We are focused on giving our customers more reasons to choose to fly United Airlines,” United vice president Ankit Gupta said. “With nearly 100 new routes announced this year, we continue to deliver on our commitment to build a global network with destinations where our customers want to fly.”
United will also offer new service between its Houston hub at George Bush Intercontinental Airport and key tourism hubs in Durango, Colorado; and Ontario, California. The carrier will also offer twice-daily service between Los Angeles and Stockton beginning August 20.
In addition, the airline will introduce new service between Washington Dulles International Airport and Traverse City, Michigan.
You want to ride the best vistas, the best curves and have thrilling adventures in far off lands. Perhaps you lack the time and money to scour the globe for decades on two wheels or maybe you just want to skip ahead to the good stuff.
Also two-thirds of our little rock is covered in water so sooner or later as a motorcyclist, you’re gonna have to fly. Leod Escapes founder Cat MacLeod worked in airfare and we book a lot of airfare ourselves for our guides. Here’s our tips for fellow touring riders.
There are so many variables in the marketplace for airfare that there really are no rules. There are however principles based on the balance of probability and even that doesn’t conform to a standard distribution.
Advanced mathematicians put together the pricing algorithms to try to keep airlines running in the black and even they fail sometimes. So buying airfare is more about what you understand than a precise prescription of what you should do.
Start looking at the airfare market about 10 months before you want to fly. Yes it’s sometimes possible to get exceedingly cheap deals last minute but those are rare. Get familiar with the airlines that commonly service the route you are interested in.
At Leod Escapes we start poking around the airfare market as soon as we have tour dates. That can be up to a year in advance. We typically use kayak.com as it’s interface is pretty good and they do a good job of aggregating airline fares and consolidator fares. We generally follow their advice on when to purchase because their fare forecaster is pretty good.
People always say they want the cheapest fare, until they see what they’d have to endure to get it. When the cheapest fare from San Francisco to Munich involves 30hours of flight time with a 5 hour layover in Copenhagen and another 10 hours in Istanbul, suddenly that price isn’t worth it.
One of the reasons airfare is so complicated is everyone has different thresholds of what they are willing to pay. How much more would I pay to fly with Air New Zealand over United? How much more would you pay to fly KLM instead of WOW (Icelands Low-cost Airline). Is a direct flight with 5 hours chopped off the travel time worth an extra $400? Should I use my points and save $500 but have to pay $700 more for the flight? If you start shopping early, you will face questions like these.
Chances are there’s more than one major airport within an acceptable drive time of your home. Smaller “secondary” airports have cheaper gate fees (what the airport charges the airline) and can play host to discount airlines. Do not overlook them. A business class seat on a discount carrier out of a secondary airport can be cheaper than an economy class seat on a major carrier out of a bigger airport. Airports and national airlines are heavily subsidized by tax dollars.
As such, Alitalia pays less to park it’s planes in Rome than United Airlines. Lufthansa pays less than Delta to park a plane in Munich. Sometimes countries want your tourism dollars and increase the incentives through subsidies to a national carrier. Even if the prices are the same, you’ll generally get a better flight experience for your money via an airline based in the country you are visiting.
Airlines form alliances for a number of reasons. One of them is to try to get around the higher gate fees charged to “foreign” airlines. Airlines within the same alliance are not equal, so keep an eye out for that. For example, that Air New Zealand flight is actually “operated by United”. This is called a codeshare and it can be disappointing if you’re not watching for it.
As tour operators we’ve seen clients make this mistake a lot. There are 24 time zones on the planet and the damn globe revolves at 900mph. Pay close attention to the local times of your departure and arrival, that includes the date, as crossing the international date line can make things fun. Consider that the best time to arrive in your destination is late morning to early afternoon, so you can check into your hotel and get a shower and then try to walk off a bit of that jet lag.
Checked baggage is limited to 50 pounds per bag. As a rider you’ll discover that sport touring jackets and pants as well as track racing suits are more bulky than heavy. Look for large lightweight cases or duffle bags with wheels. Don’t count on luggage carts being available in your destination. Aside from issues of availability, they are often coin operated and usually when you arrive you don’t have any local coins. When shopping for bags and cases, consider that there is another sport that frequently travels with very bulky gear… hockey players.
It’s easy enough to replace shirts and a toothbrush but replacing motorcycle gear can be tough when you are forced to do it in a rush. So it’s really vital that your gear arrives with you. Checking in early increases the probability that your luggage will make it on the plane. Avoid short layovers where your bags may not have the time to make it from one plane to the next. A good layover time is 2 hours.With taxiing time, getting everyone out, boarding time for your next flight, if you have less than an hour you will be running and your bag won’t make it.
Should your bag get misrouted, you want to make it is easy for people to discover it. Make sure your luggage tag is solid. Put a printed itinerary inside your bag and take a photo of your bag so you can show it to the appropriate personnel. Finally, avoid the temptation to ship your gear bag. Aside from the wary question of who is going to receive it, importing items into other countries is fraught with many variables and paperwork can sometimes hold things up considerably. You’re the hero of your own story, keep your supersuit close to you.
As frequent global travelers we’ve seen a lot of security lines. It’s useless theater to provide the illusion of safety. The ever changing and completely different standards at different airports around the globe at least give it a sense of variety. What’s more troubling than the show you participate in, is the one that goes on with your checked bags. DO NOT leave expensive consumer electronics of any kind in your checked bag. You will undoubtedly be taking a camera or two with you, make sure the expensive hardware is in your carry on luggage. Things like knives, emergency roadside tools and such need to be stowed in your checked luggage but buried well inside helmets, socks, boots and multiple zippered compartments. The TSA has taken a number of GoPro cameras and Leatherman tools out of our checked luggage over the years so we’ve learned. If they are going to take things out of your bag while searching it, at least make them work for it, bury those items deep.
This all seems like a bit of a hassle until you let the clutch out for the first time and take off down a foreign road. No cages, or cattle barges for you, you’re a motorcyclist and your adventure starts now.
This is helping to keep ticket prices low, which also drives demand, especially among leisure travelers. According to data from the travel booking platform Hopper, round-trip domestic ticket prices for holiday flights are averaging $304, a drop of nearly 10 percent from last year. (Prices for international flights ticked up a bit, rising $66 on average.)
“If you actually look at the average price of tickets in real terms adjusted for inflation, air traffic continues to be more and more affordable,” Mr. McKone said.
With ticket prices lower, more Americans will be flying, and Hopper estimates that overall spending will be 6 percent higher this holiday season than last. “Having lower prices definitely does drive demand,” Mr. McKone said.
Airlines for America, the industry trade organization, estimates that domestic airlines will add, collectively, 143,000 seats daily to accommodate holiday travelers, and according to Patrick Surry, chief data scientist at Hopper, much of that capacity is being added by the major carriers at large hub airports.
Southwest Airlines, for instance, announced new routes last month in Northern California and the Washington, D.C., area, as well as to popular warm-weather vacation destinations. United Airlines, which expects to transport roughly half a million passengers — a 4 percent increase over 2017 — on its peak holiday travel days, is increasing the frequency of flights to locations like the Caribbean and ski resort areas, and plans to add nearly 20 domestic wide-body aircraft to help manage full flights over the holidays, an airline spokesman, Charlie Hobart, said.