Brought to book
The past few years have seen a stream of kiss-and-tell books by former flight attendants, each volume filled with steamy anecdotes about what airline staff supposedly get up to both in the air and on the ground. The original, a bestseller in its day, was Coffee, Tea, Or Me? The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses, published in 1967 but reprinted in 2003 on the heels of Around the World in a Bad Mood: Confessions of a Flight Attendant, and In-Flight Entertainment, which both appeared a year earlier. This month sees the publication of Air Babylon by the team of Imogen Edwards-Jones and 'Anonymous', which lures readers with true-life tales of 'the births, the deaths, the drunken brawls, the sexual antics and the debauchery behind the scenes of the ultimate service industry'. Last year Edwards-Jones and another 'Anonymous' lifted the lid on the hotel industry with Hotel Babylon, also reprinted this month. Both books are available from
www.paddyfield.com.
Travelling right
'When is a holiday not a holiday?' asks Tourism Concern, a British organisation that promotes ethical and politically correct tourism. 'When it's a guilt trip!' comes the strident reply. Reading through the organisation's latest campaign literature, you might feel like you're already on one, with a stern warning that 'cheap holidays often result in poverty for local communities', and the admonition that 'we must end the exploitation of those who work for us while we're on holiday'. Visit
www.tourism
concern.org.uk and you'll find a list of 10 ways to become a more sympathetic and right-on traveller. There are also a couple of cynical T-shirts on sale, illustrated and emblazoned with 'Child Labour Villas' or 'Exploitation Hotel', either of which should attract sideways glances the next time you check in to a luxury resort.
Fighting back
Hot on the heels of a successful lawsuit brought by a passenger against Air Jamaica for providing a substandard business-class service, Virgin Atlantic has made an out-of-court settlement with a passenger who claimed the carrier failed to provide him with 'adequate seating'. Seat pitch in Virgin's economy-class cabins varies from 30 to 32 inches, and it was 1.9 metre-tall Michael Downey's bad luck to be squeezed into the former. Downey, who said he spent the flight from London to Miami with his legs in the aisle, was offered #300 ($4,060) plus #30 in legal costs before the case went to trial 'as a gesture of goodwill and without admission of liability'.
