Airports, Asia, Europe, In the News, Oceania, Weekly

This week: new airport dining, fog delays and increased security measures

This week we bring you airport news from India, Australia, England, China and New Zealand with topics ranging from the opening of a new celebrity chef restaurant to fog that disrupted many travellers plans.

Exactly a week ago, we once again saw how depending we are on technology these days when the global airline booking system ‘Amadeus’ crashed. One of the affected regions was Australia where The Sydney Morning Herald reported that passengers at Australian airports faced long queues and flight delays due to the global outage of computerised check-in systems used by Qantas and Virgin Australia. An Amadeus spokesman said the company was looking into the system crash and apologised for the inconvenience.

While we’re reporting from this side of the globe, let’s get the New Zealand news out of the way: There this week travellers weren’t impressed as the weather, once again, played against them at Auckland (AKL). There heavy fog delayed a number of flights on Thursday, as reported in the New Zealand Herald.

On a lighter note, this week we also heard of the opening of two exciting, new airport restaurants: One was Jamie Oliver’s new eaterie at London Gatwick (LGW) – as reported in London’s Evening Standard – and the other one the Spanish tapas bar MoVida at the international terminal of Melbourne Airport (MEL) – as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald.

To eat at the airport you first need to get there which sometimes can be quite a hassle. Well, its definitely going to be inconvenient in New Delhi (DEL) as we were told by IBN Live that the Delhi Metro Airport Express will suspend operations on Saturday night after major construction defects were detected. It is then said to re-start only in late August.

To finish up, we’re going to expand on this tweet from Thursday:

The New York Times reported on Thursday that the western region of Xinjiang has increased security measures at all 16 of its airports after a failed hijacking attempt. According to the article the new security measures include requiring disabled passengers to present hospital-issued certificates if they want to bring crutches on a plane. Passengers flying from the city of Kashgar (KHG), which is near Hotan, must check crutches and wheelchairs as baggage.

That’s all we have – don’t forget to follow us on Twitter  for the latest airport updates throughout the week. Save travels everyone!

[Photo from Flickr – Some rights reserved by avlxyz]