This Week’s Featured Link
American and Iberia are moving at London Heathrow — here’s what you need to know – TPG
“Hey, you know, things are tough for travelers right now, so what we should do is swap terminals around with 2 weeks’ notice.” I just assume this is how the conversation went. Forget that this now changes minimum connecting times and all that… what could go wrong?
Image of the Week
Two for the Road
Delta and Misapplied Sciences launch a personalized flight information board in Detroit – TechCrunch
This nifty little technology seems unnecessary right now when the screen will just show “canceled” to everyone anyway.
Deutsche Bahn to become latest Star Alliance member – Business Traveller
Your move, Landline.
13 comments on “3 Links I Love: Poorly Timed Terminal Shift, the Skynest Arrives, More”
The personalized flight screen is part of a bigger project that was underway prior to COVID. Many of you may remeber it being rolled out at CES that year. DL was also dabbling in things like using VR to train ground employees. All of these pet projects should be on hold until the airline is flying level again.
I’m just waiting for Delta and Misapplied Sciences to take control of the light tunnel at DTW and make it so that each traveler can enjoy a soothing/calming/energetic/trippy/etc experience (of their choice) when transiting through the light tunnel.
/I’m being only slightly sarcastic there; I’d love to be able to have that light tunnel really wake me up and energize me when I arrive at DTW in the morning for an important business meeting, or to put me to sleep when I’m about to board a long evening flight from DTW. That tunnel is always an interesting (albeit sometimes slightly odd) experience when traveling through DTW.
“I’d love to be able to have that light tunnel really wake me up and energize me when I arrive at DTW in the morning for an important business meeting, or to put me to sleep when I’m about to board a long evening flight from DTW. That tunnel is always an interesting (albeit sometimes slightly odd) experience when traveling through DTW.”
I’ve never been there in person, only seen it on YouTube. That said, it sort of has an ASMR effect when watching it. Perhaps the same effect happens when walking through?
For airport “art” it’s actually pretty decent. The big sculptures in the ATL tunnel / walkway between terminals A & T (for those who chose not to take the people mover) aren’t bad (more interesting than 2-D paintings, pictures, or billboards), but I prefer the DTW light tunnel over those.
At the risk of dating myself, going through the DTW light tunnel reminds me a little of walking past Rainforest Cafe in the mall 20 years ago, but perhaps that’s just the sound effects.
Do these new boards also know if English is not the pax’s native language? Just curious.
Angry Bob – I believe it is designed to work that way, yes.
If the user has another language selected as their preference the displays will be in their preferred language. Actually had the opportunity to see the language support in action at the CES 2020 demo when I was a group that had quite a few Japanese participants and you had to get right up on somebody to see their display information.
I don’t know. . .it seems that my phone can be a personalized flight board. . . .cool technology but pretty unnecessary.
The “Skynest” is an interesting idea, but I’m not sure how well it’s going to work in practice. Monitoring the use of the Skynests and getting people out of them to make room for the next “nesters” is just going to put more load on FAs. I just hope they never get someone like my friend Steve who is virtually impossible to wake up.
Not just Landline, but Amtrak as well as they do at Newark with UA.
*as they used to do. That partnership ended in 2020.
I was in DTW this week and saw the display in the center of the concourse. I had no idea what it was as it is only labeled as “Parallel Reality” with no explanation as to what it’s for. It’s not even clear whether it’s a Delta thing, a DTW airport thing, or some third-party advertiser (I assumed the latter). I even stopped to look, but couldn’t determine the device’s purpose. Apparently I was not alone since no one was using it or asking questions of the two workers at the desk.
What was being used by a few was the the boarding pass scanner on the terminal map display (right before the Parallel Reality arch), which then highlighted your departure gate.
Air New Zealand will probably sell this much the same way American sold sleeping berths on trans-con DC-3s in the late 1930s – and that was based on the way the Pullman Company sold upper-and-lower berths in its sleeping cars from 1864 onwards.
Not sure if links are allowed in comments, but if so, see: http://dc3dakotahistory.org/a-dst-trip/