Mario's World

I came across these figures on the Amadeus Annual Report. In 2011, Amadeus employed 101% of their staff! What a great company.

The arrivals page on the Abu Dhabi airport website is interesting. It gives you the option to search for flights that landed the previous day but nothing ever shows up. It’s like no flight landed yesterday! Seems you can’t get info on any flight 1 hour after it lands. Makes sense since you’ll probably have [...]

Came across the Sabre Red App Centre today. I think it’s a great move for Sabre and hope they move to a more open source approach to enable more developers to code great apps. The site currently has very basic info and the “contact us” option on the Dev Centre page has no link so [...]

John Steffen has come up with a real fast method of boarding airplanes. “They should board from the back, each taking a seat on every other row, starting with the  window seats first.” This sounds pretty good but I doubt it would work on most Middle East and India routes. I like the part in [...]

Google’s experimental hotel finder engine is looking good. It only supports hotels in the U.S. currently. I really like the “Edit shape” option on their map. Haven’t seen this one before on any other site. And the site is very fast. That’s Google for you. The format of the search results are very neat too. [...]

I just had to share this. Crowne Plaza London will introduce “Snore Absorption Rooms” this month. I bet Ro considers me the ultimate guinea pig for testing if this new technology actually helps. Looks like they use a combination of 5 “anti-snoring” techniques/technologies to solve the problem. Wonder how easy it would be to setup [...]

I found this video on YouTube. Reminds me of the Jetsons. This is travel in 2121. I think most of this is possible in the next 5-10 years. Well almost at least, I doubt the bit with the Martians will happen anytime soon.

I found this very interesting chart on global airline traffic at Amadeus. It’s based on a study between airconomy and Amadeus. I’m not surprised to see the 13.4% increase in air travel between Asian countries and the Middle East. Looks like Qatar Airways and Emirates are the key players boosting air traffic to/from and via [...]

The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) recently granted Executive Jet Management the permission to use iPads instead of large stacks of paper for charting and maps. This was after a 3 month period of testing including 55 pilots on 250 flights. Seems the Mobile TC application developed by Jeppesen never failed during any of the tests. [...]

Came across Flight Radar 24 this morning when one of my colleagues inquired about monitoring flights in real time. I immediately focused on the Middle East region and found an interesting flight path. Looks like the site tracked this flight’s take off and landing multiple times as it shuttled between Kuwait and Dubai. There was another interesting flight [...]