Trip Pulse
Monday, on the first day of Pollution Prevention Week, Sandals Resorts International (SRI) announced that all 19 Sandals and Beaches Resorts across seven Caribbean islands – including Jamaica, the Bahamas, St. Lucia, Antigua, Grenada, Barbados, and Turks & Caicos – will eliminate the 21,490,800 single-use plastic straws and stirrers used across the resorts each year by November 1. Eco-friendly paper straws will be available upon request.
Trip Weekly
Swiss International Airlines and Brussels Airlines, both of which are part of the Lufthansa Group, are now offering free extended stopovers for passengers transiting through Zurich and Brussels from the U.S.
Flyers on Swiss can stop for up to four nights free of charge before continuing onto their next destination. The stopovers are available on most fares from the U.S. to Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia via Zurich.
USA Today
Delta Air Lines is set to introduce what it’s calling the “first biometric terminal in the U.S.”
The carrier says it’s equipping the Atlanta airport’s international terminal (Terminal F) with face-scanning technology that will allow international passengers to use facial recognition technology “from curb to gate.” It also will be available to passengers flying nonstop from Atlanta on Delta partner airlines Aeromexico, Air France-KLM or Virgin Atlantic.
ZDNet
Alibaba Group has announced plans to launch artificial intelligence (AI) robots for key service industries, starting with hospitality, with the aim to improve efficiencies and better meet consumer demand for faster response time.
Driven out of Alibaba’s AI product development unit, A.I. Labs, the new service bots would be available for deployment in the hospitality sector from next month, the Chinese vendor said at its annual computing conference held here this week.
