World Tourism Blog

Waiting. That’s the worst mistake a traveler can make these days.

It’s what Femi Adenuga did after buying tickets for his parents to fly from Lagos to Pittsburgh through Travelocity. “A week after the purchase, while e-mailing the itinerary to my dad, my eye caught a single letter error in my mother’s first name,” said Adenuga, a college student. He contacted Travelocity, which got in touch with Delta Air Lines, which urged him to cancel the ticket and buy a new one.

Delta’s official ticket name policy, outlined on its site, is abundantly unclear: “In general, Delta and Northwest do not allow a name to be changed on an existing PNR.” (A PNR is shorthand for Passenger Name Record, which is a fancy way to describe your itinerary.)

In general?

I can think of lots of exceptions, including this memorable case involving a canceled destination wedding and a ticket that needed to be changed for obvious reasons. But I digress.

Adenuga shouldn’t have waited to review the names on his tickets. As I’ve mentioned a time or two, many travel agencies can change a ticket name if the error is caught quickly. A week later, you’re pretty much at the mercy of your airline.

I’m dedicating this column to travel mistakes, a topic will be familiar to anyone who reads this feature or follows my misadventures as National Geographic Traveler magazine’s ombudsman. I haven’t collected all of my favorite travel errors in a single column in a while, and the industry has changed. Not necessarily for the better, I might add.

Travelocity tried to help Adenuga, to no avail. Delta refused to change one letter, instead telling the online agency it would “make a notation” in the record, but adding that it couldn’t guarantee authorities would allow his mother into the country. Based on that advice, Adenuga bought a new ticket, and Delta issued a voucher for the amount of the first ticket. Hard money training.

For the second time in a little more than a year, a glitch at one of the two centers that handle flight plans for the nation’s air travel system set off delays and cancellations for passengers around the country.

The snarl Thursday — traced to something as simple as a single circuit board — prompted calls for more money and manpower at the Federal Aviation Administration, which has struggled without success for years to overhaul the air traffic system.

The circuit board, at an FAA center in Salt Lake City, is part of a multibillion-dollar nationwide communications network that the agency has spent years installing as part of plans to modernize air traffic control.

A government watchdog said last year that the network was over budget and plagued by outages. On a single day in 2007 alone, the failure of parts of the network was responsible for 566 flight delays.

Aviation experts are unsure whether any system that relies on the interconnectedness of computers can prevent glitches from causing havoc unless there are sufficient backup systems to handle the thousands of flight plans filed each day in the U.S.

“A good communications system should have enough redundancy that a failure shouldn’t hurt it that badly,” said Michael Ball, a University of Maryland professor who specializes in aviation operations research.

Hundreds of flights were canceled or delayed from Atlanta to Houston to Phoenix after the problem began about 5 a.m. The glitch was fixed about four hours later, but scattered delays were reported throughout the day. Planes in the air were never in danger.

While the delays were not as bad as those caused by a major winter storm, passengers — already frustrated by add-on fees for checking bags and the other hassles of everyday air travel — were miffed. Hard money training

The remnants of Tropical Storm Ida were expected to continue tracking through the Southeastern U.S. on Thursday.

The system was forecast to continue pulling abundant moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and allow for wet weather over the South. Rainfall in the Southeast could decrease to light and scattered showers with totals near a half of an inch. But strong winds were expected to increase over the region with wind gusts of up to 30 mph.

The slow-moving system was forecast to continue to flood the region from the Gulf of Mexico, up the Mississippi River, and up the East Coast in to the Mid-Atlantic states.

Scattered showers also were expected to increase up the coast as additional moisture comes in from the Atlantic.

Strong storms were forecast in the Carolinas and Virginias with rainfall totals of up to 2 inches with periods of strong thunderstorm development. Coastal flooding and erosion were expected over the Mid-Atlantic states.

Behind this system, a large high pressure system could move from the Plains and Mississippi River Valley and into the Great Lakes and Northeast. It was expected to continue bringing mild weather with mostly sunny skies and warm conditions.

Temperatures in the Northeast were expected to remain in the 50s while the Midwest could see a warm day in the 60s. A trough of low pressure was forecast to start pushing in from the Rocky Mountains and bring strong winds to the Southern Plains. Gusts could reach up to 20 mph in the Plains, with temperatures reaching into the 70s.

In the West, a trough of low pressure was expected to continue tracking eastward from the Pacific Northwest and over the Northern Plains. Most areas of Montana and Wyoming could see between 3 and 5 inches of snowfall with more at higher elevations.

Oregon and Washington were forecast to start to dry out and remain cool with highs in the 40s. A light mix of snow and rain was expected and could bring less than a half of an inch of accumulation. Light rain was forecast to spread into northern California as a cold front pushes southeastward through the region. Hard money training

The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznań (Poland 1-12 December 2008) ended successfully with a clear commitment from governments to shift into full negotiating mode next year in order to shape an ambitious and effective international response to climate change, to be agreed in Copenhagen , Denmark, at the end of 2009.

“Governments have sent a strong political signal that despite the financial and economic crisis, significant funds can be mobilized for both mitigation and adaptation in developing countries with the help of a clever financial architecture and the institutions to deliver the financial support,” said Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

“We now have a much clearer sense of where we need to go in designing an outcome which will spell out the commitments of developed countries, the financial support  required and the institutions that will deliver that support as part of the Copenhagen outcome,” he added.

Countries meeting in Poznań made progress on a number of issues that are important in the short run - up to 2012 - particularly for developing countries, including adaptation, finance, technology and reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

Progress was made in the area of technology with the endorsement of the Global Environment Facility’s “Poznań Strategic Programme on Technology Transfer”.  The aim of this programme is to scale up the level of investment by levering private investments that developing countries require both for mitigation and adaptation technologies

In addition, the conference discussed in detail the issue of disaster management, risk assessment and insurance, essential to help developing countries cope with the inevitable effects of climate change.

Governments meeting under the Kyoto Protocol agreed that commitments of industrialized countries post-2012 should principally take the form of quantified emission limitation and reduction objectives, in line with the type of emission reduction targets they have assumed for the first commitment period of the protocol.