Being able to surf the Web while jetting across the planet in a pressurized tube at 40,000 has quickly moved from a novelty to a standard feature on a lot of airlines. Most systems today rely on ground-based stations from providers like GoGo to relay signals from the airplane, but when JetBlue’s in-flight WiFi system comes online in 2012, it will rely on Ka-band satellites. Read more »
It may not be the first airport with a library (that honor belongs to Nashville), but Amsterdam’s Schiphol is surely one of the largest airports to get its own library.
It’s not every day that we see the launch of a new flight booking engine. Hipmunk, which was founded by a group of veteran web entrepreneurs takes the good old ITA QPX matrix and adds the ability to actually books trips to the matrix interface. Currently, Hipmunk uses Orbitz’s booking system to popular its fight search results.
Besides the useful interface, which really makes finding flights that arrive and/or depart at the right time easier, one feature that makes the app stand out it the tabbed interface, which allows you to open up numerous tabs with different search results – similar to the different tabs you can open in your browser. This makes comparing prices for different dates especially easy.
Frequent fliers who want to keep their mileage accounts well stocked will be happy to hear that the service allows you to limit your searches to specific airlines. Sadly, though, Hipmunk doesn’t offer the ability to filter results by airline alliances. The ability to filter by layover airport is another missing features that you are probably used to from Kayak.
Overall, though, this is a good start for Hipmunk, though given that its inventory is only driven by Orbitz for now and that it is missing a number of features that frequent fliers have come to expect, it remains to be seen if the company will be able to make a dent in the market. For leisure travel, however, it is definitely worth a try, even though we wouldn’t be surprised to see the large travel sites add a similar matrix to their flight results pages soon. After all, Orbitz just started to retool the way it displays flight andhotel search results.
San Francisco’s mayor Gavin Newsome just announced that SFO will now feature free WiFi for all travelers. As in too many airports, travelers passing through SFO had to pay to access the Internet over WiFi until now.
To log on, simply look for an “sfo free wifi” access point.