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Travel Stories for a Chuckle

May 11th, 2009 Posted in General, Travel funnies

This is a couple weeks old, but timeless. The Telegraph has a slideshow on 17 of the world’s weirdest festivals. Yes, it’s annoying to click through 17 times to pump up their page view numbers, but even if you only see the first one it’s worth it: the Baby Jumping Festival in Spain. (The photos for the rest of them are great though.)

Public figures in the UK got a shock when their £30 each flight on RyanAir got hit with a £870 bill for excess luggage. Ryanair likes people who don’t change clothes all weekend: you get charged £15 a kilo for anything over 15kgs.

Volcano boarding in Nicaragua gets an article in the New York TImes and an unbylined mention in the Telegraph. That Bigfoot Hostel/Green Pathway Tours guy knows how to score some press!

One Swiss town is fed up with naked hikers.

This shouldn’t be funny, but is, in a sad, pitiful kind of way. It’s HotelChatter’s 2009 Hotel WiFi Report. If they keep trying to charge for crappy service, for something that should be free, that only helps the wireless carriers sell a service that allows people to go around the hotels completely. Remember when people used to pay to use the hotel phone? Now it’s just an intercom to room service.

  1. 2 Responses to “Travel Stories for a Chuckle”

  2. By Mike on May 12, 2009

    We saw wifi done a few different ways on this trip – from worst to best:
    - Wifi provided by large communications companies that put wifi hotspots in touristy areas, then you had to subscribe if you wanted to use it. X$ for X hours. If you wanted 1 hour it was $8.
    - Pay 6$ for a card, scratch to reveal the code, then you get 30 min of wireless. I honestly can’t see how this does anything but hurt business. We literally walked out of hotels & restaurants that subscribed to this ’service.’
    - Pay around $5 for a code from the front desk and get 24 hours of wifi. Eh.
    - Free wifi, but every 30 minutes the page refreshes to an advertisement. This was occasionally terrifying when we were uploading pictures & what not, but once we figured out the rhythm it wasn’t bad, especially considering they could have been doing the card thing.
    - Completely free wifi. Anybody offering this was sure to receive our business as long as we were in town.

    It seems so simple…

  3. By Sarah Thornberry on May 13, 2009

    Hi there,

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