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

June 24, 2004

Four More Airlines Shared Data
Four more airlines and two travel reservation companies shared private information about their passengers with a federal government agency conducting a security screening project, the Transportation Security Administration acknowledged Wednesday, raising alarms among privacy rights advocates that millions more traveler records may have been transferred than was previously known. Delta, Continental, America West and Frontier airlines and travel reservation firms Galileo International and Sabre Holdings passed along records to TSA or private companies working with the agency in 2002 and 2003, TSA told a Senate panel Wednesday. Washington Post | Posted 6:30 a.m.
-- AP: Government may have broken privacy laws
-- Wired: More false information from TSA

• I've always suspected that more airlines surrendered passenger data after 9/11 than JetBlue and Northwest. And there may still be others. Sure, I think more data is going to make us safer. But at least tell us you're collecting the information. Send us your comments.

Family's Cruise Vacation Dries Up
Dozens of people are not happy travelers after they say they paid a travel agent thousands of dollars for a trip on a Disney cruise and have no tickets to show for it. The Frink family was sitting outside Penn Towne Travel at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday waiting for answers. The west Philadelphia family said they had been planning their trip for a year. They were scheduled to start their 8-day Disney cruise Thursday at 7 a.m., but were told by the agency's owner, Jean Brown, that there were no airline tickets, no reservations and no sign of the $32,000 they say they paid the woman. "People trusted me with their money and now I have nothing to show them," said Joyce Frink, one of the organizers of the trip. NBC 10 | Posted 6:45 a.m.

Hotel Clerks See 'Interesting Things'
The hotel clerks on the graveyard shift are the gatekeepers to a land of warm beds, free HBO and ice down the hall. Typically the only hotel employees working in the dead of night, the overnight clerks, check in latecomers, answer the phones and do the bills. But it's never, ever boring. "It is interesting," says Jill Liger, 24, the night clerk at the Laurel Inn. "You run into a lot of interesting people on the night shift. The crazies come out at night." What kind of crazies? "I'm usually yelling at the people to get out of the pool in the middle of the night - usually the drunks," Liger says. Mount Laurel is a land of dozens of hotels, home to every variety from motels to extended-stay complexes. Courier Post | Posted 7 a.m.

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• And finally ... which European airport is worse than London's Heathrow? Stansted, according to reader Dennis Smith. "Wonderful, nice personnel," he writes. "But the layout of the airport reminded me of a game of Doom." Note, Dennis, that you're the first of several thousand readers who has ever compared an airport to a video game. Posted 7:10 a.m. | Send us your comments.

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