Bizarre tales from around the globe.
This was the year the travel industry finally had it up to here with snarky tweets, caustic Yelp reviews and other social media slights — and decided to fight back.
Seeing how that went, we’re predicting the industry will opt to keep its mouth firmly shut in the coming year.
This was also the year the Knee Defender made the leap from annoying one passenger to enraging an entire planeload, the year we began to measure security lines not in minutes but in miles, and the year we
learned that “The Marriage of Figaro” may be our last line of defense against mountain lion attacks.
If you were able to travel this year, you know what we’re talking about. If not, know hope: Things can only get better in 2015.
Right?
As dirty rotten hovels go, it deserves a full five stars
The owners of an inn in Hudson, N.Y., thought they’d hit upon a foolproof way of ensuring good reviews on Yelp and TripAdvisor: They threatened to charge guests $500 for negative comments.
It didn’t quite work as planned. Thousands of people logged on to Yelp to write scathing — and mostly fake — reviews of the Union Street Inn. Posters complained about noxious odors, rude employees, rats, garbage, tired decor, noise, cockroaches and “one-ply toilet paper.” One sarcastic five-star review praised the inn for leaving a copy of “Mein Kampf” on every night table.
By the time owner Chris Wagoner deleted the policy from the inn’s website, saying it had been intended as a joke, Yelp had removed more than 3,000 negative reviews of the inn because they were “inappropriate,” Today.com reported.
As of this writing, though, dozens are still up there.
In England, a hotel had a similar policy — and made good on the threat.
Tony and Jan Jenkinson posted an excoriating TripAdvisor review of their stay at the Broadway Hotel in Blackpool, calling it “a filthy, dirty rotten stinking hovel.” The wallpaper was peeling, there was no hot water, the carpet was stained and the advertised “ample parking” nonexistent, they wrote.
In November, after they’d returned home, they spotted a charge for 100 GBP ($157 U.S.) on their credit card, according to CNN. They called the hotel, who told them it was their policy to charge guests for negative comments.
The couple say they’re trying to get their money back while the Broadway Hotel in Blackpool, England, enjoys its extra splash of free publicity.
He must have just tripped and fallen onto the podium
Italy’s largest university made an interesting choice of guest speaker to lecture graduate students about “the management of panic control.”
The speaker: Francesco Schettino, the skipper who smashed the Costa Concordia into a rock off the Italian island of Giglio in 2012, killing 32 people. Yes, the guy who said he “tripped and fell” into a departing lifeboat while thousands of panicked passengers were still onboard the sinking ship.
Schettino, who is on trial for manslaughter, spoke for almost two hours to graduate students at Sapienza University in Rome in August, the Florence daily La Nazione reported.
The university said it wasn’t notified and “firmly condemned” the invitation.
Hey, a posthumous ‘like’ from Timothy Treadwell!
So many tourists in South Lake Tahoe are snapping selfies with the local bears that rangers said they might have to close the area to the public.
“We can’t have visitors creating dangerous situations for themselves and others,” Forest Supervisor Nancy Gib- son of the Taylor Creek Visitor Center told CNN in October
ach fall, black bears congregate around Taylor Creek because of the annual run of kokanee salmon. Taylor Creek staff told CNN they were “routinely” seeing people get up close and personal with the animals to jazz up their Instagram feeds.
You’re almost to O’Hare; might as well keep going
On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the security line at Chicago’s Midway Airport stretched for an epic 1.2 miles, CNN reported.
At one point it snaked out of the terminal and all the way to the commuter train station before doubling back on itself.
Apparently airport security officials didn’t plan for the post-Thanksgiving rush. They were about as chagrined as you’d expect.
“This happens sometimes,” shrugged Karen Pride, spokeswoman for the Chicago Aviation Department.
His next book: A guide to urgent care in Pamplona
A 32-year-old Chicago man, “Buffalo” Bill Hillmann, was gored and nearly killed while running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, in July.
Hillmann, it is worth noting, is a co-author of “How to Survive the Bulls of Pamplona.”
The beast’s horn passed through his thigh, narrowly missing his femoral artery.
From his hospital bed, Hillmann told the Chicago Tribune he planned to come back for more next year, add- ing that he would like to make some revisions to his book.
Not only that, her ‘buh-byes’ didn’t sound one bit sincere
In July, a Southwest Airlines flight attendant threatened to kick a passenger and his children off a flight about to depart Denver because of a “mean” tweet he wrote about her.
After the attendant barred Duff Watson’s children from joining him during priority boarding, he sent out a tweet to his 268 followers calling her “the rudest agent in Denver,” according to Minnesota TV station WCCO. The flight attendant told Watson. the tweet was “threatening” and said she would remove him and his kids from the plane unless he deleted it. He did.
Southwest said the incident is “under review.”
Plenty of leg room in the detention cell
In three incidents in less than two weeks this summer, near-brawls among passengers over reclining seats forced commercial airliners to make emergency landings.
The first happened when a passenger on a United Airlines flight from Newark to Denver deployed the infamous Knee Defender, a plastic gizmo that prevents the seat in front of you from reclining. Words were said, flight attendants were summoned, water was thrown and the other passengers got to enjoy an unscheduled stop in Chicago, where the combatants, both 48, were taken
off the plane.
Incidentally, they were both sitting in Economy Plus, which offers 5 more inches of legroom than normal Economy
Not long after that, an American Airlines Miami-to-Paris flight had to be diverted to Boston when a French passenger became cheesed off over a reclining seat.
And a few days after that, a Delta Air Lines flight from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to West Palm Beach, Fla., had to set down in Jacksonville, Fla., after two women got into it over the same issue.
Instead, please lock them to the Montparnasse Tower
You know those “love locks” that started appearing on scenic bridges around the world a few years ago? According to the Los Angeles Times, so many were attached to the Pont des Arts footbridge in Paris that a section of its grill work collapsed in June.
For the uninitiated: The idea is that two lovebirds affix a lock with their initials to the bridge and toss the keys into the river as a sign of their undying love. Some blame the craze on a popular 2006 novel by the Italian writer Federico Moccia.
They’ve become such a nuisance that officials in Venice used bolt cutters to remove them from the Ponte del Accademia, the newspaper reported. Florence stripped 5,000 love locks from the Ponte Vecchio, and New York’s Transportation Department last year cut away 5,600 from the Brooklyn Bridge.
Hold on a minute while she changes her status to ‘wet’
A tourist in Melbourne, Australia, had to be rescued after walking off the end of a pier while checking her Facebook feed on her phone, the Associated Press reported.
Rescuers found the woman, who was not identified, flailing in the water, about 65 feet from the pier.
“She told us later that she couldn’t swim,” Senior Constable Dean Kelly of the state water police told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “She still had her mobile phone in her hand.”
(This happened in mid-December 2013 — too late to make last year’s roundup. But we hope you’ll agree it was too good to pass up.)
It probably beats waiting in line at Chicago Midway
Talk about being stuck on the ground in bad weather.
After a Russian airliner’s tires froze to the tarmac in minus-61 Fahrenheit weather in November, 74 passengers in the northern Siberia town of Igarka got out and tried to push the plane free.
A video of the passengers went viral — one man is heard saying, “Real men can plant a tree, build a house and push a plane” — but it was later suggested they were doing it as a joke.
“It would be funny if it didn’t pose a horrendous threat,” Oksana Gorbunova, a local official, told the Tass news agency. “People could have damaged the aircraft skin and the flaps.”
Eventually the plane was towed free of the ice.
She had no trouble hitting the high notes
Standard advice for a mountain lion encounter: Don’t run, and make yourself look big. If that doesn’t work, says Kyra Kopestonsky, try an aria.
In August, Kopestonsky was stalked by a cougar while hiking in Colorado’s Down Valley Park. The animal followed her for half an hour, crouching menacingly each time she tried to back away, and at one point crept to within 8 feet of her.
“I don’t know why,” she told Denver’s KUSA-TV, “but I just started singing opera really loud.”
The mountain lion “sort of put its ears down and ... backed away.”
Sorry, tree fans, you can’t blame this one on Yoko
In Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, a 10-foot-tall pine tree dedicated to the late George Harrison in 2004 was killed in July by an insect infestation.
You guessed it. Beetles.
Afterward he went home to his Sussudio apartment
As protests go, it wasn’t exactly Julia Butterfly Hill atop an ancient redwood. In March, a 21-year-old man chained himself to the door of a rest stop next to a busy Illinois highway to try to stop its demolition.
The man, Kevin Walters, explained: Twenty-one years and, ahem, nine months earlier, his parents were on their way home from a Phil Collins concert when they felt something in the air that night and pulled into the rest stop for a groovy kind of love. (Yes, we’ll stop now.) The result was Kevin Walters.
Sadly, Walters’ act of civil disobedience came to naught and authorities tore down the site of his, uh, genesis.
Next time just get a henna tattoo and leave it at that
A Scottish woman brought home an unusual souvenir from a backpacking trip to Vietnam and Cambodia: a 3-inch-long leech. Up her nose.
Daniela Liverani, 24, from Edinburgh, had been suffering from nosebleeds for weeks, but figured they were the result of an earlier motorcycle crash, the BBC reported in October. She assumed the thing she felt moving in her nasal passage was a blood clot.
It wasn’t until Liverani was in the shower that her little stowaway came out to say hello.
“My nasal passages would open up because of the steam and the heat and the water,” she said, “and it would come out quite far, about as far as my lip.”
Doctors removed it with forceps and tweezers and gave the still-living souvenir to Liverani to take home.
“He’s in the (garbage) bin,” said Liverani. “He’s probably long gone by now. I boiled him first.”
And by ‘flight information’ she means Candy Crush
A Jet Airways flight from Mumbai to Brussels plunged more than a vertical mile in August while the pilot dozed off and the co-pilot was too busy to notice. She was riveted to her iPad.
According to the website Cult of Mac, air traffic controllers in Turkey noticed the sharp drop on their radar, and when it reached an altitude assigned to another airplane they radioed the plane. The pilot was on a scheduled break and the co-pilot later told investigators she was looking at “flight information” on her iPad.
None of the 280 passengers was hurt, but India’s general of civil aviation has termed it a “serious incident” and has asked the airline to turn over all records from the flight.