Skift Originals

Monocle's list is a pleasant reminder that cities which are great for tourists -- New York City, London, Rome -- aren't always wonderful places to live.

It's difficult to see why airlines, hotels, and others would want to replace apps that help them manage relationships with loyal customers with a feed to a platform that doesn't do anything special for them.

Anyone who has ever been through LAX's international terminal knows it sorely needed a better gateway, in all senses of that phrase. Now lets see if the humans operating it get any manners re-do, so to speak...

Etihad's aggressive strategy to take equity stakes in five other airlines, and to take advantage of the resulting economies of scale makes a lot of dollars and sense.

While hotels have been doing more marketing about their pet-friendliness, airlines have been regressing as a rule, and it shows in this survey. But sooner or later, travel industry -- potentially working with services like DogVacay -- will have to do more to address the high spending user base.

Some skeptics believe that passenger self-boarding will be slow to get adoption across U.S. airports because of security concerns. Self-service kiosks in customs face similar hurdles, and have much greater potential to really benefit airline passengers.

Twitter is slowly building additional features into the main service, and this new acquisition means it will make its formal entry into a local-travel and discovery sector, and may give a run for the money to other larger startups like Foursquare.

You see passengers here and there using mobile boarding passes at the airport these days, but their use is hardly omnipresent. That could change over the next few years, however, as mobile boarding passes become a staple of third-party apps.

Free Wi-Fi on airlines makes a lot of sense. It should be viewed as a necessary utility. But, the Wi-Fi systems will have to improve because they can't handle bandwidth demands even now with so few passengers using the onboard Wi-Fi.