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...
Town in Namibia Confounds Tourists By Changing Its Name to Something You Won't Believe
Posted on 08/14/2013, 12:45 PM
A few months, ago, a small fishing town on the extremely isolated Atlantic coast in southern Namibia spent $100,000 in local dollars to erect a huge Hollywood-style sign on the mountain above its streets. LUDERITZ, it proclaimed for tourists, many of them from Germany. It was all for naught. The president has renamed the town to something a little less colonial. Now it's called !nami?nüs. ...
Time to See Africa? Wildlife Experts Warn Elephants Will Be Gone in 15 Years
Posted on 08/12/2013, 6:30 PM
A disturbing report today in Britain's Metro newspaper: The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust has calculated that an elephant is poached every 15 minutes in Africa. With 36,000 dead in the past year alone, at the current kill rate, they'll all be dead in 15 years. The article quotes Dame Daphne Sheldrick, a charity head: "A world without elephants is hard to comprehend but it is a real possibi...
Carriers Large and Small Going Slower to Save on Fuel Costs
Posted on 08/12/2013, 6:15 PM
It'll take you longer to get there now. Ryanair has instructed its pilots to stick to a 600mph speed limit, which will save the carrier on fuel costs but also make trips take longer. It's not just exploitative airlines like Ryanair—although it gets the bad press for it. JetBlue did the same thing in 2008 and saved $13.6 million. In 2011, Cunard Line's Queen Mary 2 quietly increased most o...
