Again we borrow from the Greeks to bestow praise, kudos, on the doers of great and noble deeds -- or, in some cases, just for doing the right thing.
We begin with the airlines. For a bunch of grown-ups, they complain an awful lot about how the government is out to get them, but on the matter of the recent increase in the security-related tax on airline tickets, they have a point. For many travelers, this tax went from bad to ugly.
Not only was it restructured from $2.50 per boarding to $5.60 per one-way trip, it is no longer subject to a cap of four charges per roundtrip ($10). Thus, on some multistop itineraries the tab can now go to $22.40 or more because any four-hour break in a journey is considered another one-way trip rather than a connection.
Airlines for America is challenging the tax in court and lobbying for a rewrite in Congress, where the House has passed legislation to reimpose a cap. But restoring a cap doesn't fix what the U.S. Travel Association rightly calls a "critical" fault in the tax -- the fact that rather than being spent entirely on security, part of it now goes to the general treasury.
Kudos to the airlines and U.S. Travel for pointing out this bad precedent yet again.
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Kudos also to Signature Travel Network for requiring its travel agency members to become members of ASTA.
It may seem a little heavy-handed for a marketing co-op to make this a requirement rather than a suggestion, but we prefer to describe it as "bold" and therefore worthy of praise.
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Marriott can also take a bow for being the launch partner in "The Envelope Please," an initiative with A Woman's Nation to place "gratitude envelopes" in over 160,000 North American hotel rooms to remind Marriott guests that it's OK to leave a little something for the housekeeping staff.
We recognize that tipping practices across the globe are not always easy for travelers to understand, so the envelope might serve as a useful hint for international visitors.
And for the rest of us American slobs, it can serve as a polite reminder to say thank you to the people who clean up after us.
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A special variety of repeating kudos is due to Carnival Cruise Lines for renewing its Great Vacation Guarantee for 2015. The guarantee offers a 110% refund and free transportation home to dissatisfied cruisers who notify guest services within the first 24 hours that they want out for any reason.
Carnival says the guarantee has been invoked a mere 47 times in the last year, which is pretty good odds against 4.5 million guests -- all the more reason why Carnival should take a bow.
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We all know the trope about "If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium," even if we didn't see the 1969 movie of the same name. Alas, most cruise passengers will get the joke if you say "If it's 8 a.m., we must be on a shore excursion."
Happily, it has finally dawned on one cruise line, Crystal, that not every leisure traveler wants to be multi-tasking at sunrise, so it has developed some optional short excursions that can comfortably start a bit later in the day -- say 11 a.m. or noon.
In addition to plain vanilla kudos, this utterly civilized innovation also deserves our "Why didn't they think of it before?" award.