What a week this one has been! We’ve seen everything from taxi blockades, sake vending machines, custom strikes, United Airlines woes in multiple cities to North Korea’s new airport terminal. As always, you can see the whole week in our tweeter feed, but for now here are our selected airport headlines from this week:
- Paris Uber blockade & bomb threat evacuation
- Kim Jon Un’s new airport terminal
- TripAdvisor launches airport pages
- Osaka’s sake tasting machine
Yep, we’ve chosen only one ‘bad’ airport topic this week for our review. And we’re talking about Paris’ airport issues this week. It started with French taxi drivers clashing with riot police while disrupting Paris rush-hour during a protest against online ride service UberPOP on Thursday. CNN reported that the cabbies claim Uber threatens their jobs by taking customers way from licensed cab companies. The French government ruled the UberPOP app illegal last year, but the company hasn’t exhausted all legal recourse. One celebrity was caught in the middle and tweeted the following:
Dude @kanyewest we may turn back to the airport and hide out with u.picketers just attacked our car #ParisUberStrike pic.twitter.com/MtanurybOO
— Courtney Love Cobain (@Courtney) June 25, 2015
The second annoyance for travellers in Paris happened on Saturday when according to the International Business Times Charles de Gaulle International Airport (CDG) outside Paris was evacuated after a bomb threat Saturday, French media outlets reported. Delaying all flights until further notice, the threat came in the wake of three terrorist attacks in France, Kuwait and Tunisia Friday.
Moving on to North Korea. Yes, North. There NBC News said North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un toured a new airport terminal in the Pyongyang International Airport (FNJ). The terminal is home to high class shops, restaurants, and waiting areas. The question only is how many of its citizen can actually use it? See the pictures on the page of the NBC article.
It will probably take a while until TripAdvisor gets onto Pyongyang International Airport, but the company announced this week they are moving into the airport review space. “Over 3.1 billion travelers pass through airports each year, with the average traveler spending 150 minutes of airport ‘dwell time’ between arriving at the terminal to the doors of the plane closing at the gate,” says Adam Medros, TripAdvisor’s senior vice president, global product. “We want to help them quickly find things to do on the site while they’re waiting to catch a flight, or book an airport hotel when they need a place to stay.” According to CNN the travel booking and review website says its airport pages will allow users to rate restaurants, hotels, attractions, duty free stores, boutiques and lounges while also giving them the ability to find the cheapest flights to that airport. Fittingly, the first airport to get its own TripAdvisor page is Singapore’s Changi Airport.
And to finish the week off, something from our friends at Rocketnews24. According to the website, Osaka International Airport (ITM) in Japan offers travellers Sake vending machines. Apparently there are 3 machines with 10 different brands each, selling Sake tastings at 100 yen (US$0.81). What a great idea to kill some time while you wait for your flight. As long as you don’t overdo it of course. Haha.
That’s all for this week – safe travels!