Archive for the 'Chicago' Category
Priceline gives weekly updates on Thanksgiving and Christmas air travel
October 21, 2009 9:59am
If you are still waiting for a good deal to book your holiday travel, we suggest you tune into Priceline’s travel blog. Brian Ek is giving a weekly update on flight costs for travel around Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Earlier this month we talked with Ek about holiday airfare prices and concluded that if you had to pick between traveling during one of the holidays, Thanksgiving was going to be cheaper. However, in this week’s analysis, prices are going up for Thanksgiving and coming down slightly during Christmas.
“At the macro level, Thanksgiving airfares increased to an average $372, while December holiday airfares dropped to an average $423. Thanksgiving is still the better deal, but Christmas is looking better,” Ek writes.
These averages are based on flights booked by Priceline customers. So, what does it mean for SoCal travelers?
Ek said that airfares between Los Angeles and Chicago were down 9% for winter travel and up 20% for Thanksgiving. However, fares between Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., were down 8% for Thanksgiving travel and unchanged for winter travel.
For more end-of-the-year travel booking advice, read “Holiday travel planning tips from the experts.”
—Jen Leo, Los Angeles Times Travel & Deal blogger
Image: Priceline logo. Credit: Priceline.com
Fair Oaks Farms tour in Indiana: For $10, a birthing barn and a giant inflated pillow
October 20, 2009 8:35am
As quirky, off-the-beaten-path attractions go, it’s hard to top Fair Oaks Farms, a working dairy farm with 21st-century flair, only an hour or two from Chicago or Indianapolis. Fair Oaks features 3-D movies, a birthing barn, farm tours, a play area with a gigantic inflated pillow (think trampoline) and a restaurant that serves probably the best grilled-cheese sandwich ever. And the ice cream might be even better.
It won’t break the bank either. Farm tours are $10. Meals are even less (sandwich/soup combo $6.25). And this is not the drab, dusty farm from your third-grade field trip. It is a state-of-the-art facility in a storybook setting.
The birthing barn alone makes this attraction worth a pit stop. All day long, Holsteins in the first stages of labor are brought into a theater, where in an hour or so, they produce a baby calf right before your eyes. As biology lessons go, it is thrilling stuff and, of course, fairly graphic. The entire operation, which houses 30,000 dairy cows, produces 80 to 100 calves per day. Warning: The process may be a little overwhelming for children under 5, though when we were there kids of all ages were in the audience.
Theme park news: Legoland water park, Real Madrid theme park, Wizarding World DVD extras, Neverland negotiations
September 12, 2009 5:58am
A roundup of my theme park Twitter updates for the last week:
* Legoland California to open a separate-admission, 5.5-acre water park by summer 2010. (L.A. Times)
* Built in 1927 and rebuilt in 1948 and 1994, Comet coaster at Great Escape in New York gets American Coaster Enthusiasts landmark designation. (Screamscape)
* DVD extras on “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” movie to include short feature on Wizarding World themed land at Universal Studios Orlando. (Orlando Sentinel)
* Report: Michael Jackson’s family negotiating to open Neverland as a Graceland-like amusement park by Christmas. (New York Post)
* Disney: No plans to use Marvel characters in Orlando parks, no concerns about brand confusion with Universal Studios. (Orlando Sentinel)
Fitness is just a phone call away at Fairmont Hotels & Resorts
September 4, 2009 5:55am
Road warriors who want to stay in shape while they travel won’t have to worry about packing their sneakers and sweats anymore.
The new Fairmont Fit program, sponsored by Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, has more than 5,000 pairs of Adidas sneakers, thousands of T-shirts and shorts and complimentary MP3 players loaded with hundreds of brassy exercise tunes. The program is available to members of the chain’s loyalty program, the Fairmont President’s Club.
The President’s Club, which has free membership, keeps members’ workout gear sizes on file, or participants can list their sizes when calling for a hotel reservation. The fee is $10 per stay, or is complimentary for those who stay five times or 10 nights per year.
In addition to having clothing available, the program issues yoga mats and stretch bands for those who prefer exercising in their rooms to a visit to hotel fitness centers. Clothing and footwear are delivered to the room upon a guest’s arrival. Workout gear is available for the duration of the stay and can be replenished at any time.
Just call me Willis: Sears Tower now officially renamed
July 16, 2009 9:36am
Goodbye, Sears Tower. Today is the first day that the Chicago skyscraper totes its official new name. The turning point for the tallest building in the U.S. was marked this morning with a public ceremony.
The 110-story building is owned by American Landmark Properties of Skokie, Ill., but London-based insurance-brokerage firm Willis Group Holdings “secured the naming rights as part an agreement to lease 140,000 square feet (13,000 sq. meters) of space, and has said it plans to bring hundreds of jobs to the city,” according to the Associated Press.
What’s in a name? In this case, a lot of controversy. There are and have been many adamantly opposed to the W-word. After all, the landmark has been called Sears Tower since its beginnings, in 1973. Read the rest of this entry »
Be my guide: Social media travel tips are valuable but limited by the crowd
July 9, 2009 10:10am
View Be My Guide: Cross-country road trip in a larger map
When it comes to collecting travel tips, there’s strength in numbers. For the last two weeks, I have been traveling across the country in my 1999 Pontiac Grand Am and using the collective knowledge of readers and online social-media wanderers to lead the way.
The response was overwhelming —literally, my e-mail in-box could barely hold it all. But the tips were invaluable and led me to hidden gems that AAA or most other travel agencies would never have listed. I’ve put a lot of them on the Google map above.
For many of the 14 cities I visited, locals whispered to me via the Web, pointing me to the underground hot spots. Some of the best suggestions popped up in Chicago, Nashville, Austin and Albuquerque. The pearls in those cities were mostly small, unassuming places outside the usual downtown bar scenes. They’re hidden from the public eye.
Smashed guitar, YouTube song — United is listening now
July 7, 2009 7:02pm
Here, without rhythm, harmony or rhyme, is Dave Carroll’s problem: Last year, while he was flying from Nova Scotia to Nebraska on United Airlines, somebody broke his $3,500 guitar.
Big deal, you’re thinking. Who has time to keep track of all the things United breaks? (See bottom of story for some statistics, which suggest that several other airlines are worse.)
But Carroll and his band, Sons of Maxwell, have told their tale with rhythm, harmony, rhyme, not to mention some wicked humor, and their four-minute, 37-second complaint, “United Breaks Guitars,” above, is racking up views on YouTube.
Chicago O’Hare sees delays due to United Airlines computer problems
July 2, 2009 8:32am
It’s not a pretty sight at Chicago O’Hare. The Chicago Tribune reports that a United Airlines computer glitch has caused serious delays and grounded the airline’s flights at the airport. Look at the picture of passengers backing up at Terminal 1. The expressions on their faces seem a little bit tame to me.
United Airlines acknowledges the problem on its website and suggests that passengers check in online. It has also issued a travel waiver for those traveling to, from or through Chicago on July 2. The travel waiver page has links for you to check your flight status, reschedule your travel and get signed up for automated flight updates.
You can find some Twitter chatter under the hashtags #ORD and #United.
– Jen Leo, Los Angeles Times Travel & Deal blogger
[Photo: Chicago: Travelers wait at Terminal 1 as a computer glitch grounds United flights at O'Hare International Airport this morning; Michael Tercha / Chicago Tribune]
Be my guide: Taste of Chicago and a helping of blues music at Kingston Mines
June 27, 2009 5:18pm
My arrival in Chicago on my two-week, cross-country road trip happened to line up with the city’s annual Taste of Chicago. I grabbed my dinner samplings there before heading north to Kingston Mines to get an earful of some authentic blues music.
The food festival, at Grant Park, has booths set up for local restaurants around the city to showcase their wares and for locals and tourists to snack on a variety of foods.
Reader Mike P. wrote that I should definitely check out “gluttonfest,” as he called it. Another reader disagreed. “Stay away from the Taste of Chicago,” Mike Klempin wrote, calling it “way overrated and too expensive.”
Be my guide: Building the ultimate iPod set list for a road trip from New York to Los Angeles
June 16, 2009 7:58am
Jack Kerouac and Hunter Thompson hit the road decades ago, each with little more than a car, a suitcase full of clothes and presumably another suitcase stocked with some fairly potent narcotics.
I will embark on a similar journey next week from New York to Los Angeles. In place of the copious amounts of drugs, however, I will be packing a laptop and an Internet-connected cellphone that will aid me in discovering this expansive nation, with its diverse inhabitants and culture.
As an amateur rock musician and enthusiastic consumer of such, music will be my guide. No, scratch that. How about you be my guide? To provide travel tips, send e-mails to mark.milian@latimes.com, leave comments on this blog or, for those on Twitter, send tweets to @mmilian.
I will post updates to the Daily Travel & Deal blog, snap photos of the scenery and Twitter my progress. Plus, of course, credit readers when I visit a place they suggested. Then I’ll write a story for the Los Angeles Times Travel Section about the trip.
Thanks to the ubiquity of wireless technology (well, we’ll see what happens deep in the countryside), I’ll be able to stay perpetually connected with readers and vice versa.
