AppATrip, Customized Mobile Apps for Hotels
We’ve all heard the loud voices professing mobile is the future. Yours truly has a nice little folder full of travel apps on her smartphone. But while the benefits of going mobile and offering an app to your guests might sound great, not all hotels have the time and resources to build their own application. Here’s where AppATrip and their mobile apps come in handy.
What AppATrip actually does is offer you a a ready-to-use mobile app that you can easily customize to suit your hotel’s needs. It works on all major mobile operating systems, iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile and it is quite a flexible setup – other than the core application setup, you can add modules as you see fit. The pricing scheme also allows to pay a one time price or go for a monthly fee. Read more…
The Franklin Institute Launches SPY: The Secret World of Espionage Exhibition
Starting Saturday, May 4, and only for a limited time, The Franklin Institute Opens a really interesting exhibition: SPY: The Secret World of Espionage. All the espionage fans or simply curious people wishing to see some rare objects – and even some for the first time exhibited! – from famous agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), as well as the impressive private collection of intelligence historian H. Keith Melton, are invited until October 6 at the Mandell Center at The Franklin Institute. Visitors will discover over 200 historical artifacts and authentic espionage-related gadgets from CIA, including the scripts and studio documents from the real life mission that inspired the Academy Award winning film, Argo.
Melton has just published Spy Sites of Philadelphia, a book that allows readers to find out more from two and a half centuries about this fascinating world of espionage. Read more…
3 Amazing Days in Istanbul – Part II
Missed Day I? Check it out here!
After spending the first day in Istanbul in the Old City, visiting mosques and palaces and the Grand Bazaar, it’s time to continue are historic stroll and slowly move toward a different kind of shopping. We’ll start at the Galata Bridge (maybe after a quick snack in Eminonu, before crossing the bridge (I recommend doing it on foot, to thoroughly enjoy it).
After making it across the bridge, it’s time to climb up the stairs and enjoy the breathtaking views of the city that the Galata Tower will treat you to (see above). If you love taking photos from up top, Galata Tower will be to your liking. It also might be the place to eat, if you want to take in the city while enjoying your meal. But if you’re following this guide, there won’t be any time for it! Read more…
European Hotels Migrate to Offering Free Wi-Fi
67% of hotels in Europe are providing free Wi-Fi for their guests, an analysis of 125,000 properties on hotel site HRS reveals. The country with the most hotels providing Wi-Fi as a complimentary service is Turkey, with 84.70% of hotels offering free Wi-Fi, followed by Sweden (82.30% of the hotels), Poland (80.50%), The Netherlands (77.40%) and Norway (75.30%). Top ten is completed by countries such as Belgium, Denmark, Czech Republic, Russia and Finland.
Portugal is the country with the fewest hotels providing free Wi-Fi (43.70%), followed by Italy (53%) and Greece (55.20%), the analysis presented by tnooz.com showed.
Shrinking seats and overbooking fuel surge in US airline passengers’ complaints
Although airlines are getting better at arriving on time and reducing baggage mishandling incidents, passengers are complaining more and getting less happy, as shown by a report on airline quality by researchers at Purdue University and Wichita State University analyzing the 14 largest U.S. The companies covered by the report were Air Tran, Alaska, American, American Eagle, Delta, ExpressJet, Frontier, Hawaiian, JetBlue, SkyWest, Southwest, United, US Airways, and Virgin America.
The shrinking size of seats, crowding more people into a plane, ticket holders being turned away because of overbooking, these are the most prominent reasons for the passengers’ discontent. As a result, passengers are also complaining more – the number of complaints filed with the Department of Transportation increased by one-fifth in 2012. Read more…
Moscow Is the World’s Most Congested City, Says TomTom
Moscow was the most congested  city in 2012 according to TomTom’s recently released Annual Congestion Index. The 2012 Congestion Index report compares congestion levels in 2012 versus 2011 in 161 cities and across five continents. Last year’s hellish drive was the Russian capital, where an average journey takes 66% longer during non-congested periods and 106% longer during morning rush hours when traffic is no where near free-flowing.
TomTom’s Congestion Index a quite accurate barometer of congestion in urban areas and it is created based on real travel time data captured by vehicles driving the entire road network. TomTom’s traffic database is quite impressive, with more than six trillion data measurements, its current growth rate being of five billion additional measurements every day. Read more…
Athens, Greece – History, Beauty and a Little Fear of Disappointment
I ended up in Athens on a whim. May 1st (Labor Day in Romania) came at just the right time to make it a long weekend and although I was already in my mid twenties, I had decided to try out the “go to the seaside” trend that I wanted to experience ever since high-school. As May 1st celebrations on the Romanian seaside usually entailed lots of hormonal teenagers and college students drinking their wits away, I had never been actually allowed to go.
While browsing the hotel offers and trying to fit it all in my budget, something deep inside my head started turning and just out of curiosity, I googled hotels in Athens and started thinking of gas prices. I realized driving to Athens (about 800 kilometers or 500 miles), booking a two-night stay at a hotel (mind you, not a posh one), paying for food, museums and seeing other attractions, would actually be cheaper than spending the long weekend on the Black Sea beaches. I immediately called the people I was supposed to go with and cleared it with them. I also immediately thought of my mom and convinced her to go as well. Actually, I later found a list of things I wanted to do I had come up with in high-school, and taking my mom to Athens was on that list. Read more…
