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E L L I O T T' S TRAVEL NOTES
Travel news, opinion and analysis

January 22, 2004

Hotels: Stop Using the Web, Please
U.S. hotel operators want to break the dependence on Web sites like Expedia and Travelocity that many developed during the three-year slump in travel, executives said this week. Expecting the rush to the Internet to increase, lodging companies are looking for ways to limit the appeal of such third-party sites and to improve their own offerings. "We created this monster," Best Western President and Chief Executive Thomas Higgins said during a panel at the American Lodging Investment Summit, an industry conference, in Los Angeles. "There has got to be room for both of us." Reuters | Posted 7:30 a.m.

Beware of Highway 'Speed Demons'
The Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) yesterday called on the nation to focus more attention on the growing problem of excessive speeding by drivers. Higher travel speeds on both rural and interstates are responsible for approximately a 35 percent increase in death rates. Kathryn Swanson, Chair of GHSA, says the organization is concerned that speed has become the neglected “stepchild” of highway safety. The Weekly | Posted 7 a.m.
-- Mass. study concludes speeding "shatters" life

• Highway safety is unlikely to command the headlines the other travel industry segments do, but as I pointed out in a recent NPR commentary about driving, it's very much a part of our lives. Send us your comments.

Boyd: Security Going 'Crayola'
Airline critic Mike Boyd doesn't think much of CAPPS II, the government's controversial pre-screening system. "Yessir, everybody'll get a color," he writes. "Green if you're good. Yellow if they're not sure. And Red means, well, you can't fly. All in the sole judgment of the TSA. The same people who have listed 'Jim Davis' as a no-fly-check-him-out name. He points out that the feds can't even keep track of aliens on student visas. So now they want background information on all of the roughly 550,000,000 people who travel by air in the US. That's about 1.5 million records each day. ASRC | Posted 7:30 a.m.
-- MPR: Sharing passenger data not unusual
-- Observer: CAPPS II has 'slave' overtones
-- Post: New screening system 'troublingly vague'

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• And finally ... a break from the bad airline news (that's so 24 hours ago) to talk about the technology we love to hate. Cell phones, it seems, are everyone's least favorite, "can't-live-without-it" toy, as determined by a decidedly unscientific online poll. So what should we do about those pesky gadgets? That's the real question. Posted 7:30 a.m. | Send us your comments.

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