UK Holiday Inns Offer Human Bed-Warmers

(NEWSER) - Families are traveling more often, and recession-battered hotels are ramping up their kid-friendly offerings, the Boston Globe reports. Rooms occupied by families with children accounted for 27% of the total in 2008, up from 25% in 2004, and lodgings are watching the trend. Whether it's free Wii, a dog to walk, or a theme guest room, the trend is picking up and is no longer relegated to just the summer months. More»

Frustrated travelers camp out in airports, train stations

(NEWSER) - Hundreds of thousands of passengers on their way to family holiday festivities in Europe were camped out instead yesterday at mobbed airports and train stations shut down by record snow and cold. London's Heathrow Airport was largely closed for a second day as wanna-be fliers huddled under emergency blankets on trash-strewn floors, some of them for a third night waiting for their plane to take off. "It's very hard," a passenger with a ticket to Dallas told CNN . "All I want for Christmas is to hug my daughter." Charles De Gaulle and German airports canceled more than a quarter of their flights, and several Eurostar trips were delayed or ditched. More»

They may be cheap, but you really don't want to stay in them

(NEWSER) - Unless you like urine-scented rooms and hairs in the bathtub, you probably won’t want to stay at any of Trip Advisor ’s top 10 dirtiest hotels in the US. Below, a sampling of the user reviews:

1. Heritage Marina Hotel, San Francisco: “The second room ‘appeared’ clean until we realized the next morning that we slept with bed bugs.”
2. Days Inn Eureka/Six Flags, Eureka, Mo: “The smell was horrible. The floors and walls were dirty. There was food and beverage spilled and dried up all over the place.”
3. Tropicana Resort Hotel, Virginia Beach: “The ice machine produces dirty ice and is not fit to use.”
4. Super 8 Virginia Beach/At the Ocean, Virginia Beach: “There were hairs in the bathtub, and bugs on the counter.”

Hotel ranking site shows dangers of crowdsourcing

(NEWSER) - Some recent snafus have taught TripAdvisor the hard way that crowdsourcing may be powerful, but it isn’t always reliable. In one recent incident, a new boutique hotel shot to the top of the site’s Miami Beach hotel rankings on a flood of positive reviews—until one reviewer implied they’d all been written by friends of the owner during a free trial period. “This possibly explains why none of the reviews so far mentions the fact that the hotel is not completed.” More»

(NEWSER) - It may quash the cuddling time, but couples might want to consider sleeping in separate beds—for the good of their health, sleep experts tell the BBC. Bed sharers suffer 50% more sleep disturbances than those who sleep alone, according to one study. Such lousy slumber can lead to depression, heart disease, strokes, and even divorce. “People actually feel they sleep better when they are with a partner, but the evidence suggests otherwise,” says one sociologist. More»