Hilton Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort Now Generating Power From Rooftop Wind Turbines
Posted on 12/06/2013, 4:30 PM
On top of the 26th floor of the Hilton Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort, barely visible from A1A and the beach on its doorstep, six wind turbines have just been installed. I checked them out on a recent visit to the city. For now, they bow down like modernist sculpture, held horizontal by their hydraulic lifts, but this month, they will be unfurled to a height of 35 feet above the roof line a...
New York City's Newest Tourist Attraction: Monthly Concerts By Billy Joel
Posted on 12/04/2013, 12:30 PM
Las Vegas casino-hotels long ago carved out a healthy tourist industry from installing popular artists in long runs. Elvis will always be the King, of course, but in recent years, residencies by artists such as Celine Dion, Motley Crue, Britney Spears, and Carrot Top have been an incentive for tourists to pack up and fly to town. (Okay, maybe not Carrot Top.) Now New York City's esteemed Madi...
Handy Discount App HotelTonight Now Offers Discounts from 9am Daily Instead of Noon
Posted on 11/26/2013, 12:45 PM
The same-day hotel discount app HotelTonight has grown by leaps and bounds since its debut in 2011, going from a coverage of just a few cities to now around 200 locations around the globe. If you're not familiar with it, the app works like this: On the same day that you need a hotel reservation, you check the app to see which handful of hotels need to unload last-minute rooms for cheap. Some ...
AppleCare+ Now Lets You Repair Your Apple Products Where You Travel
Posted on 11/21/2013, 12:00 PM
AppleCare+, and its similar product AppleCare Protection Plan, are like insurance policies for your Apple product—iPhone, iPad, iPod, laptop, and the like. If you crack your screen on your iPhone, for example, having purchased its $79 AppleCare policy, the company will fix it for a nominal fee, saving you from having to purchase a whole new phone. Until recently, you could only get your Ap...
Virgin America Releases the Grooviest In-Flight Safety Video of All Time
Posted on 11/04/2013, 4:15 PM
A few weeks ago, Air New Zealand bent the rules of due diligence by bringing out an uproarious in-flight safety video featuring Betty White and Gavin McLeod and set at a retirement village. (Click here to see that hilariously daring segment.) Now Virgin America has upped the game with its own entrant that'll appeal to the other end of the age scale. It may be the grooviest, sassiest, pop-and-...
The Trailer for 'Pompeii' Starring Kit Harrington Mistakes Tourist Attraction for History
Posted on 10/14/2013, 10:45 AM
The cheesy, pectoral-flexing Hollywood treatment of the destruction of Pompeii will arrive in cinemas in February, but the quick teaser trailer is already here. It starts as the camera trails along those famous ossified corpses supposedly left by the volcanic eruption in the year 79. "Many wished for death," intones a gravelly voice as the camera pulls back to reveal a field of such bodies, s...
Watch Betty White's New In-Flight Safety Video for Air New Zealand
Posted on 10/09/2013, 9:45 PM
Air New Zealand, an airline known for its celeb-studded safety videos (which have featured Richard Simmons and, erm, some hobbits, managed to convince TV legend Betty White to do its brand new in-flight safety for the A320. The four-minute segment is set at a sunny retirement village and titled "Safety Old School Style. Now Miss White—born in 1922, 35 years before the first jet was even in pa...
5-Day Sailings on the Disney Magic Marked Down to $125/night in November
Posted on 09/03/2013, 1:15 PM
Thanks go to our friends at MouseSavers.com, who published this hot deal for Disney Cruise Line. Normally, excursions on the line are premium-priced, well over $200 a day, and rarely discounted—but a deal has surfaced that's good for staterooms that are more like $125 a night. That level of pricing is rare enough to mention. The deal is good for all November dates on the Disney Magic excludin...
AARP Members Get 10% Off and Free Wi-Fi at Motel 6
Posted on 09/03/2013, 12:30 PM
It's not much, but it's something. Motel 6 announced today a partnership with AARP. Now the group's 37 million members will be entitled to a discount of 10%, plus free Wi-Fi, which usually is charged at $3 a day. Based on a $37 room in suburban St. Louis, a typical pricing example, that combined deal, including Internet, would bring the cost from $40 to about $33. So that dead-cheap motel ro...
Economizing, Six Flags in New Jersey To Create World's Tallest Drop Out of an Existing Ride
Posted on 08/29/2013, 1:30 PM
Six Flags has blazed an admirable path. Many observers were concerned that the amusement park chain would have a hard time getting back on top after emerging from bankruptcy, particularly given the public's appetite for a new big-ticket ride each year. But it has devised clever ways to economically satisfy America's hunger for big projects. Great Adventure, a Six Flags park midway between New...
