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Airports, as miserable as they are in the overall travel experience these days, continue to be a place to show off, and social media outlets like Facebook are perfect venues for that.

Davies' advocacy of small airlines banding together under a single operational management to trim costs is an interesting one as traditional airline alliances are giving some ground to new kinds of groupings. His idea, though, would face regulatory challenges.

Most of these are for hotel rooms of today, smart incremental improvement in guest experience and hotel room efficiency. The Hotel Room of the Future will need a lot more than this.

The suggestions are surely well-founded, but airlines and airports in this market are unlikely to adopt policies demanding short-term investments - even if they do offer long-term returns.

American Express, other mega travel agencies and their corporate clients aren't going to be able to put the genie back in the bottle with badges and leader boards. There is a lot of turf-protection going on here.

Tapping into the eco-friendly market might help hotel chains out of their slump, but they'll have to prove that their efforts aren't merely "green-washing," and also deliver on the basics.

It's tough to say that Bloomberg's lasting legacy will be New York City's transportation transformation with so many changes taking place in the past 12 years. We can say with confidence that the improvements are still just small steps towards insuring the city keeps pace with well-designed sustainable urban initiatives abroad.

The best way to watch: full screen, preferably through your big screen TV, with the soundtrack coming through the best sound system you have. Then you can decide.

There has been a lot of skepticism about whether Virgin America could turn itself into a profitable airline. It still faces tremendous competition and big-time challenges, but today's earnings announcement was a hopeful sign for an airline that a lot of people feel very good about.

We're not betting that selling half-seats will happen any time soon, but the idea is something worth sitting back and wishing for the next time you can smell what your seatmate had for dinner.

Marriott and JetBlue have admitted that there were hack attempts; Expedia is reporting more credit card fraud, and HomeAway has been coping with an epidemic of phishing incidents. The state of online security and privacy is getting very dicey.