Google's Smart Glasses, Newark's Flight Cuts and Wyndham's Live Tourism Perks
On today's pod we discuss Google's four-eyed tools for travelers, flight cuts at Newark airport, and Wyndham's new live tourism benefits for its loyalty members.
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Good morning from Skift. It's Thursday, May 22. Here's what you need to know about the business of travel today.
Google is providing travelers another choice for a wearable live translator and personal travel guide. The company revealed more information about its upcoming smart glasses, writes Travel Technology Reporter Justin Dawes.
Dawes notes the glasses will be equipped with a camera, microphone, and speakers. Google's demos of the glasses featured AI answering questions about a coffee shop, giving directions, and translating speech in Hindi and Farsi to English
Google's smart glasses will be a direct competitor to the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which also have a feature for live voice translation as well as the ability to act as a tour guide.
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Next, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has ordered airlines to reduce flights out of Newark International Airport, the site of several disruptions in recent weeks, writes Airlines Reporter Meghna Maharishi.
Newark will initially be able to accommodate only 28 arrivals and 28 departures an hour. The changes at Newark after the FAA recently met with several airlines to discuss reducing capacity at the airport. Multiple tech outages and staffing shortages have led to a series of disruptions out of Newark.
The FAA also said it would increase air traffic controller staffing in Philadelphia, which oversees airspace around Newark. Currently, there are 22 certified air traffic controllers and five fully certified supervisors based in Philadelphia, short of the 38 the FAA believes are needed for smooth operations.
Finally, Wyndham is enabling members of its loyalty program to redeem points to attend concerts and major sporting events, writes Senior Hospitality Editor Sean O'Neill.
The company launched Wyndham Rewards Experiences, which included more than 100 activities at the time of its launch on Tuesday. O'Neill notes many of the experiences are offered as dynamic auctions, where members bid for the chance to get tickets to events. Those events include the Vans Warped Tour in California and the Country Jam in Colorado.
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