links from the web: aug 4 edition. toilets, chinese tourists, angry tweets, and expedia

1) gerry from the tarmac writes a post about the history of airplane toilets and how they work. it only occurred to me after reading this that the blue-water systems are indeed much less common today. who knew that some variants contained formaldehyde?

2) i scrolled down a few posts from him, and saw that he wrote about how much the average chinese tourist spends in vancouver. $1,600 CAD for a person who is used to the chinese standard of living, is a lot!

3) hack my trip writes about angry united airlines customers accidentally tweeting to #unitedairlanes, and how the parody twitter account is kind of embarrassing for united. very similar to #untied.

4) it's not a link, but in the last few weeks, i just found out that expedia.ca was now offering air canada tango fares online. it used to be that they didn't -- they would only offer their flex fares and above, and so it was only really beneficial to use expedia.ca to book westjet flights in canada. but now, they have "web fares" -- funny, i didn't realize that people actually booked their tickets any other way for expedia these days.

i like using expedia to book my tickets because via great canadian rebates, each ticket you purchase will get you a $1.50 rebate. i book two one-way tickets at no extra cost just to get two rebates. and while $3.00 is not a whole lot, it's better than the $0.00 that you get back from booking on the airline website directly.