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author of the new book “The Gamification Revolution” and chair of the annual Gsummit in San Francisco, describes it as the process of using the best ideas from games, loyalty and behavioral economics to engage people and solve problems (or both). It generally involves the use of motivational techniques and psychological triggers, like being alerted to a challenge or offered an opportunity for higher status, often in combination with digital candy like badges, points and leader boards.

Gamification can engage people simply by making travel more playful and social, like Virgin America’s new seat-to-seat delivery feature that encourages fliers to “get lucky” by sending one another cocktails and messages through the entertainment system touchscreens on seatbacks

things elemental to travel are also elemental to gamification. Hard-core travelers like to keep score: they know how many countries they’ve visited and how many miles they’ve flown. They take pleasure in accumulating badges, like stamps on their passport (and, in bygone days, stickers on their luggage). They check off must-see landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and the Parthenon as if they are levels in a video game. Even the act of traveling from one place to another becomes a personal challenge: to do so with ever more speed and status.

a market research firm, looked at online searches for flights into America, comparing the final weeks of the Obama administration with the first weeks of Mr Trump’s presidency. It found that these searches had declined by 17%.

The overwhelming majority of countries studied showed a drop in interest. The most notable exception was Russia

it is “hard to see any other short-term significant events that could be related,” other than Mr Trump’s assumption of the presidency and his travel ban.

What's your first and last name? Your education and work experience? Do you have recommendations? And are you willing to be a suicide attacker or would you prefer to be a fighter for ISIS?

Germany's interior minister said he believes data in the documents -- described by European media as the names and personal data of tens of thousands of possible ISIS recruits -- could allow authorities to prosecute people who joined ISIS and then returned to their home countries.

If they did not hear from him, they would know that he is dead."

Budget airlines such as Ireland’s Ryanair and British easyJet revolutionized European travel two decades ago, when they first started offering to scoot people across the continent for as little as $20 a flight. That mode of travel, once celebrated as an opening of the world, is now being recognized for its contribution to global problems.

Tourists have been spooked by the realization that one passenger’s share of the exhaust from a single flight can cancel out a year’s worth of Earth-friendly efforts

“Now, when people tell me why they are taking the train, they say two things in the same breath: They say they are fed up with the stress of flying, and they want to cut their carbon footprint,

“Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”

A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.

Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.

the agency continues to warn Americans against traveling in general.

“We know that after mass travel, after vacations, after holidays, we tend to see a surge in cases,” Dr. Walensky said Monday night on MSNBC. “And so, we really want to make sure — again with just 10 percent of people vaccinated — that we are limiting travel.”

To the frustration of airlines and others in the travel industry, the latest guidance comes as students and families are considering spring break plans almost a year after wide swaths of the United States first shut down, and a growing share of Americans tentatively book travel for later in the year.

More than a dozen academics, NGO workers and media professionals CNN spoke to, who in pre-Covid times regularly traveled to China, said they were unwilling to do this once the pandemic restrictions lifted, over fears for their personal safety.

As President Xi breeds a culture of nationalism and forges increasingly hostile relations with Western governments, some fear that if a diplomatic spat between their government and Beijing occurred while they were in China they could become a target.

the detention of two Canadians in China in December 2018 as a turning point in their thinking. Michael Kovrig, an NGO worker and former diplomat, and Michael Spavor, who organized trips to North Korea, including for NBA player Dennis Rodman, were detained just after Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Vancouver on charges filed in the United States.

Yet international travel did not wither, but burgeoned. Many travelers grew accustomed to the risk, which felt on par with the health risks of fast food, the firetrap perils of living in tall buildings, or the risk of crossing urban streets against the light. New York remained an obvious target for terrorism, but it was not abandoned, and neither were the hubs at J.F.K. and Newark.

Most adult would-be travelers in the United States enjoy relative privilege and are gaining access to the vaccine, and while herd immunity remains elusive in the country at large, it is higher among more socioeconomically privileged populations, and therefore, perhaps, among fliers, the anti-vaxxers notwithstanding. The cycle of modernization dictates that new dangers emerge in one area as new safety measures pop up in another: cars are faster, but they have seatbelts; more people visit the Grand Canyon, but there are guard rails where visitors congregate.

In a time of celebrating the non-European ancestry of a near-majority of Americans, the urgency of visiting Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East is self-evident. Decisions must be made country by country. Many travelers across the years have assessed reports of possible unrest, or considered whether particular places are welcoming to women, to L.G.B.T.Q. people, to members of religious minorities. We will continue to follow those Covid numbers as if they were both revelatory and predictive. It

Wearing a face mask will continue to be a requirement at airports, aboard commercial flights and on other public transportation across the country through the summer.

The federal mask mandate, which was set to expire on May 11, will remain in effect through Sept. 13, according to updated guidance issued by the Transportation Security Administration on Friday.

The rule, which also applies to buses and rail systems, was first put in place by President Biden shortly after he took office in January.

Thousands of people are fleeing Puerto Rico as the island remains without power and the death toll continues to climb more than a month after Hurricane Maria. Even for those who can afford plane tickets and get to the airport, there’s another hurdle: evacuating with pets.  Leaving the island with animals in tow has become a huge challenge, said Sarah Barnett of the Humane Society of the United States, which has workers on the ground in Puerto Rico. The pet owners Barnett has spoken with have been “hysterical” with worry, she said.

Some pet owners stayed, remaining in dire conditions to care for animals. Others had to make gut-wrenching decisions. Claudia, a single mother who left for North Carolina with her baby and two dogs, left her other three dogs with a friend. She’s now desperately trying to bring those dogs to the mainland, too.

“They’re inundated with people wanting to fly their animals out in cargo,” Barnett said. American Airlines is accepting a limited number of pets per flight as checked baggage, and United is transporting animals through its PetSafe program.  Delta did not reply to a query about whether it is flying pets in cargo, though it previously waived fees for pets flying in the cabin from Puerto Rico. JetBlue and Southwest never transport pets in the cargo hold, though they both fly a limited number of small pets in the main cabin. A JetBlue spokesperson told HuffPost the airline has waived all in-cabin pet fees for flights out of Puerto Rico through Nov. 15, and doubled the number of pets per flight from four to eight.

Supreme court sides with Trump on refugee policy in travel ban case

The 90-day travel ban lapses in late September and the 120-day refugee ban will expire a month later.

The order on Tuesday was not the court’s last word on the travel policy that Donald Trump first rolled out in January.

"What we have seen is that we have surges after people start traveling, we saw it after July 4, we saw it after Labor Day, we saw it after the Christmas holidays," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Wednesday in response to a question from CNN's Kaitlan Collins during a Covid-19 briefing.

The issue of air travel for the vaccinated has become a hot-button issue, with the industry pushing back against the new CDC guidelines, according to CNN reporting.Read More

The new CDC guidance says fully vaccinated people can visit other vaccinated people indoors without masks or physical distancing, visit indoors with unvaccinated people from a single household without masks or physical distancing if the unvaccinated people are at low risk for severe disease, and skip quarantine and testing if exposed to someone who has Covid-19 but are asymptomatic but should monitor for symptoms for 14 days.

Numbers alone cannot capture the scope of the losses that have mounted in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Data sets are crude tools for plumbing the depth of human suffering, or the immensity of our collective grief.

The following charts — which address changes in international arrivals, emissions, air travel, the cruise industry and car travel — offer a broad overview of the effects of the coronavirus pandemic within the travel industry and beyond.

Before the pandemic, tourism accounted for one out of every 10 jobs around the world. In many places, though, travel plays an even greater role in the local economy.

Last June, as Americans began to emerge from lockdowns and into a new, uncertain stage of the pandemic, Amy Ryan and her family set sail in a 44-foot-long catamaran and headed up the Atlantic coast. They haven’t stopped sailing since.Ms. Ryan’s husband, Casey Ryan, 56, was on a partially paid leave from his job as an airline pilot, based out of Denver. School was remote for their daughters, now 7 and 11. Ms. Ryan, a real estate agent, could manage her team from anywhere. And they could rent out their house in Evergreen, Colo., on Airbnb. The family saw a window open, and they leapt through it.

For many of us, the past 12 months have been lived in a state of suspended animation, with dreams and plans deferred until further notice as we worry about venturing out for even basic excursions. But some people, like the Ryans, took the restrictions — virtual school and remote work — as an opportunity to pick up and go somewhere else. With a good internet connection, a Zoom conference call can happen just as easily on a boat or in the back of a camper as it can in a living room.

n March 12, the Transportation Security Administration screened 1.35 million people, the most passengers on any day since March 15, 2020 — still well below 2019 numbers, but a sign that more Americans are traveling again. Nearly half of Americans say that a desire to travel has played a role in their willingness to get vaccinated, according to a February survey by The Points Guy.But the survey also found that 56 percent of Americans haven’t traveled at all during the pandemic. Public health officials have voiced a growing concern that spring-break travel could lead to another surge in Covid-19 cases and increase the spread of troubling variants.

The president’s proclamation, which would not take effect until Jan. 26, after Joe Biden assumes office, was part of a flurry of orders that Mr. Biden is likely to reverse.

President Trump on Monday ordered an end to the ban on travelers from Europe and Brazil that had been aimed at stopping the spread of the coronavirus to the United States, a move quickly rejected by aides to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., who said Mr. Biden will maintain the ban when he takes office on Wednesday.

“I agree with the secretary that this action is the best way to continue protecting Americans from Covid-19 while enabling travel to resume safely,”

Already, the American death toll is of a different order of magnitude than in most other countries. With only 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States has accounted for 22 percent of coronavirus deaths. Canada, a rich country that neighbors the United States, has a per capita death rate about half as large

Together, the national skepticism toward collective action and the Trump administration’s scattered response to the virus have contributed to several specific failures and missed opportunities, Times reporting shows:a lack of effective travel restrictions;repeated breakdowns in testing;confusing advice about masks;a misunderstanding of the relationship between the virus and the economy;and inconsistent messages from public officials.

Some Republican governors have followed his lead and also played down the virus, while others have largely followed the science. Democratic governors have more reliably heeded scientific advice, but their performance in containing the virus has been uneven.

travel restrictions are producing an emerging trend among some wealthy Americans: buying a second passport.

“This limitation of mobility has made more people aware of ... the benefits of having more than one passport,”

Arton says his firm has seen a 30 to 40 percent increase, year to date, in demand for services that help clients obtain citizenship in a sovereign state through financial means. The price tag for these services varies, ranging from $100,000 for some Caribbean options to more than $2 million for European ones.

In the new reality of COVID-19, some Americans may still be willing to travel abroad - but they’re going to make sure they’re insured up to the hilt.

U.S. travel insurers are seeing a surge in demand for highly priced “cancel for any reason” policies as holidaymakers planning to venture out in the months ahead seek the kind of comprehensive cover that was seldom seen pre-pandemic.

As destinations in Europe and Asia ease lockdowns, several U.S. industry figures told Reuters this week that holidaymakers booking for later in the year were paying around 40% more for insurance as a result.

It was local virologists and epidemiologists who had honed their skills studying another virus, HIV, who discovered the new Omicron variant of covid

When cases spiked unexpectedly, they studied samples, determined that it was a new and worrying variant and—most importantly—shared their findings immediately.

Britain shut its airports to flights from South Africa and several other southern African countries. America and the European Union soon followed suit, banning flights and closing their borders to travellers from the region.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims into the U.S. would have drastic consequences for the American travel industry

just over 1 million Middle East-based travelers passed through U.S. customs

, these travelers spent an average of $6,000 each for a total of $6.8 billion.