Top travel stories for 2011 flew high with airline news

The lists for top travel stories of 2011 are just starting to come out and the American Airlines bankruptcy was near the top. But other airline news ranked high largely because of seemingly non-ending passenger PR disasters.

This was a shift in emphasis.

Facebook did not have a top ten list nearing the end of 2011 but its most shared stories last year included the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

The New York Times has yet to issue their top travel stories for last year but what they saw as “winners” the year before was certainly different from some others. Their top stories or most read for 2010 tended to involve practical advice, said The New York Times in their compilation of that time.

“If our traffic is any guide, readers in 2010 were as interested in articles that gave advice as they were in articles that focused on a destination,” said the Times then, which added:

“Stories on 31 Places to Go in 2010, a Practical Traveler column on 10 ways to cut travel costs and a Frugal Traveler guide to San Francisco were among the most viewed articles last year.”

Top stories then included “Europe Without Hotels, New York City’s Affordable Hotels, Tuscany Without the Crowds,” and “Ten Ways to Cut Your Travel Costs This Year.”

But this time around in another very different outcome, most popular stories tended to involve some aspect of airline travel. 

Rick Seaney, CEO of FareCompare, listed his No. 1 travel story in 2011 as airline “passenger PR disasters.”

“So many examples, so little time,” he wrote for ABC news.

There was the cat that escaped his carrier, American Airlines, in the baggage area of JFK. He eluded captors for two months before crashing through a ceiling. He later died. But not before American received thousands of responses.

The American Airlines bankruptcy emerged in his list as No. 2. That event, it said, “was well overdue.”

Those pesky and record-breaking number of airline hikes were rated No. 3. The good news was that only nine of the 21 hikes stuck. “But watch for more in 2012,” writes Seaney.

That was followed by airport security with angry passengers staging a “National Opt Out” day over possible cancer-risking body scanners (banned in Europe for that reason). The good news was the TSA announced that rules for children under 12 would be relaxed.

Airline fines were also a big story. Spirit was hit with $50,000 while Colgan Air was fined $2 million for offenses ranging from deceptive advertising to long tarmac delays. 

Other major stories cited by included a proliferation of the fees on checked bags, the tenth anniversary of 9-11, the Dreamliner finally taking flight after many delays and celebrity passenger problems at No. 10.

The later included an incident involving Green Day rocker Billie Joe Armstrong on Southwest when a flight attendant told him to pull up his apparently sagging pants.

Armstrong's response:

"Don't you have better things to do than worry about that?"

He used much stronger language in a tweet after he was escorted off the plane.

Southwest ultimately apologized.

What to expect next year?

Seaney’s advice: when passengers take off their belts for security, don’t forget to put them back on.

By David Wilkening