Lobby Bar – November 24: Bring Your Own Gas, Cigarettes for Kids, and Don’t Steal From Delta

Lobby Bar – A Portal to Another News Dimension

Hard to say goodbye. If it seems like we keep covering United’s final flight with the 747 Friend Ship, well, it’s because we are. One of our editors, thinking it’s Groundhog Day, keeps waking up on the day of the final flight and insists on writing a review each time.

Grinch. ’Tis the season and Christian Stampfer highlights the best Christmas markets in Austria, Belgium, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Or, to visit all of them, hop on Christian’s joy-powered sleigh, but just make sure you don’t stop smiling or having fun because then the sleigh will crash and you might just ruin Christmas.

Open sesame. With the onset of the holiday shopping season and Black Friday (which, for some reason unknown, begins [n August now), we decided to lay out what kinds of institutions will be open or closed for Thanksgiving. Consider the fact that this guide will be useful to you in planning for next year or if you plan to borrow Jesse’s time machine to go back to yesterday.

It’s all lies. The fall travel quiz is complete; let’s go over the answers. It’s true that Uber is banned in London, texting while crossing the street is prohibited in Honolulu, and Lobby Bar is now outlawed in Washington D.C., where President Trump deemed it “fake news.”

Popularity contest. The Trump Soho New York hotel will be undergoing a name change due to a decline in guest bookings. The hotel will be renamed the Obama Soho Hotel in an effort to attract more business, and every guest who books a room with Kenyan décor before the end of the year will receive a complimentary Obama bobble-head figurine, a precious commodity expected to be worth millions one day on eBay.

Supplemental breathing. More than half of the world’s busiest airports continue to offer smoking lounges, despite mounting efforts by airport firefighting personnel to put out the smoldering furniture. Let’s get the inclusion of smoking lounges back to 100% so we can continue to offer an equal opportunity to smyklers (smoking flyers) and expose our children to the essential nutrients in second-hand cigarette smoke.

Back to basics. Uber’s CEO announced this week that it had concealed a data breach affecting 57 million of its customers and drivers.  To reduce the risk of any future hackings that may expose personal information, the ride-hailing company suggests that all of its users change their names to pseudonyms in the app and switch over to bitcoin payments for all future rides.

Walking ads. A former Brookstone employee was arrested for stealing more than 2 million Delta miles.  To “give back” the miles, she has been sentenced to jog a total of 2 million miles on the tarmac at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport, sporting Delta livery and waving a flag that says “I’m sorry!”

Rules are rules. British Airways will be introducing a new boarding process starting next month. After exhausting a number of other methods, the airline has decided that it will strictly board based on passengers’ date of birth. Unfortunately, this means that children must board before their parents.

Back-up plan. Volvo will be delivering 24,000 self-driving cars to Uber starting in 2019. The cars will have the ability to pick up and drop off passengers on their own, but they won’t know how to refuel yet, so any Uber passengers traveling in 2019 should carry a jug of gasoline in their bags just to be safe.

(Photo: Accura Media Group)