Iceland goes back to the human touch
‘Inspired by Iceland’ launched its latest social media campaign this week, which features the world’s first human search engine. Using #AskGudmundur, tourists can direct any travel-related question to a group of seven Iceland specialists who share the first name Gudmundur – one of the country’s most common first names. Each of the seven specialists live in a different region of the country and are sharing their local knowledge of weather, food and drink, and activities.
American Airlines services came to a halt this week as dozens of jets were grounded due to a glitch on their pilots’ iPads. The firm’s pilots and co-pilots have been using iPad software since 2013 to view flight plans in cut-costing and increased efficiency measures. The app used by the pilots malfunctioned and caused delays across the flight network which was reportedly fixed by deleting and re-downloading the app. Efficiency and cost-cutting measures aside, sometimes you just can’t beat a bit of back-up paper.
We’re all used to finding some unusual characters on our travels and we’ve also managed to get on the wrong train once or twice, but this week a story took the biscuit on both fronts. Twitter came to the rescue when Murphy boarded a train to Llandudno. Murphy is a nine-year-old dog. The pooch was at a local football match where he is the club mascot when he decided to escape for an adventure. Surprised passengers on the train took to twitter to post photos of the mischievous Murphy in an attempt to track down his owner. The train conductor took in the pooch until he was reunited with his family.
Other happy endings this week include a Polish family who lost their camera while holidaying in London and had a stroke of luck after it was found by a woman who managed to track them down through her Facebook status shared over 7,000 times on social media within 24 hours. Through some clever detective work she was able to find the owners by tracking their flight route using the photos on their camera. That’s worthy of Sherlock Holmes!
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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