Here’s a collection of some of the top travel news from around the Internet recently
- Doesn’t it seem like we’re hearing more and more stories of families with young children getting kicked off planes lately? Â I made the call that we should end free “lap toddlers” on flights. Â Just Another Points Traveler goes the other direction with 10 tips for flying with 2 lap infants.
- Long layover? Â The Travel Sisters share a list of several airports that offer free city tours while you’re on a layover. Â You might also be interested in my article about the difference between a layover, stopover and an open jaw.
- Howie from the Frugal Travel Guy did an interesting experiment where he intentionally messed up his credit score just to see what happened. Â Check out the results from his experiment.
- I also found an interesting thread on Flyertalk where 18 passengers were bumped, and 42 additional people had their baggage left behind, all so Delta could fly “mysterious cargo” from Salt Lake City to Boston.
- TSA checkpoints failed to catch 67 out of the 70 “banned items” that test agents tried to get through.  Somehow… I’m not surprised.  But at least it gives me the excuse to run links to my favorite TSA-related posts: The hilarious parody of the official TSA kids video (“Your gameboy could be the detonation device for a chemical bomb hidden in your baby sister’s teddy bear!!!”), and “I saw you naked – confessions of an ex-TSA agent)
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
I love your blog but have to respectfully disagree on the banning lap children thing. The NTSB video is interesting but they literally came up with one anecdote and they completely ignore a number of key realities:
1. Many kids hate being in car seats. No point having one if your child won’t sit in it. As more young families grow up in cities, there are more and more kids who don’t sit in car seats because they almost never ride in a car. I’m not saying this is good. I’m just stating the reality.
2. Many parents these days use baby carriers. Wearing your baby is just as safe if you yourself are restrained and probably gives the baby far more comfort in a stressful situation than in a car seat. Furthermore, if the baby is facing the parent, it’s even safer because of the fact its safer to be facing backwards upon impact.
Banning lap children may make passengers more comfortable but let’s please stop the safety argument (I know that’s not the argument you made but other commenters did).
There is not one piece of data out there that says lap children are more at risk than children who may or may not be strapped into a car seat. Airlines would be free to create such a rule (the FAA doesn’t mandate that children under 2 MUST fly unticketed) if they felt it was revenue positive for them but they’ve realized a lot of families simply won’t travel if they had to pay for that seat before the child is 2.
Thanks for reading. I don’t feel as strongly about the safety issue but I was just for banning lap “toddlers”. Your points seemed to be in reference to younger infants (baby carriers, wearing your baby, etc). I have 6 kids, and while most of them did enjoy being worn, I can’t think of many of my kids who were satisfied in being worn for any significant length of time past 6-12 months of age (though I will grant that my kids were all very large for their age)