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Kerala’s fascinating port city of Kochi is home to landmarks representing settlers from its past, but traditional culture is still alive and well.

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Kelowna, British Columbia (CNN) — For Valentine’s Day this year, you could indulge in a cocktail-paired tasting menu at a top Vancouver restaurant, jet off to Whistler for a ski holiday or book a cozy lodge on the west coast of Vancouver Island to storm watch. But for those tired of such romantic (Canadian) clichés, British Columbia’s Hotel Zed has a heart-day alternative.The hotel, with locations in Victoria and Kelowna, is offering a four-hour “Nooner” special on February 14, which it has done for the past five years. Couples can check in from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. (rates start at $59 CAD) for some nookie, followed by a game of post-coital ping-pong in the lounge or perhaps a sexy soak in the outdoor hot tub. Baby maker promoThe Canadian hotel chain has locations in Victoria and Kelowna and is set to open one in Tofino this year.Courtesy Hotel ZedThis holiday the hotel chain is raising the stakes with a baby maker promo — if sweethearts welcome a bundle of joy into their life nine months after the Nooner rendezvous, they’ll win a free stay at the Hotel Zed of their choice for the next 18 years. (Need further incentive? A new Zed is opening this summer in Tofino, a secluded hamlet on Vancouver Island famous for its rainforest hikes and surf breaks.) Hotel Zed CEO Mandy Farmer came up with the original Nooner idea when her kids were little and she was struggling to find quality, child-free time with her husband. The prospect of a romantic tryst on February 14 was more appealing to her than a bouquet of carnations or a box of chocolates, so she took the idea to the board and they ran with it. This year’s baby making incentive seemed like a fun twist — the holiday is notoriously known for engagements, so why not conceptions?”I don’t think we’re going to convince someone who’s not thinking about having a baby to have a baby. But if you’re serious about expanding your family, why wouldn’t you try?” Farmer asks. “If you succeed, you’ll win a way to celebrate your baby’s conception for the next 18 years.”Any baby, any wayCouples who become parents through surrogacy or adoption also qualify for the promo.Courtesy Hotel ZedHotel Zed is a Pride at Work partner, and the promotion is open to everyone regardless of gender identity, expression or sexual orientation. This means couples can still win the prize through surrogacy or adoption. Attention dog lovers: Fur babies don’t count.In certain circles, “nooner” is slang for illicit quickie, so the Valentine’s special comes across as tawdry to some. The hotel has received criticism through letters and comments on social media calling it shameful and disgusting. Since the baby maker promo launched on January 14, one Facebook user has accused the contest of discriminating against people who don’t want kids or who already have kids. The hotel responded directly to the Facebook post by saying it doesn’t mean to discriminate and will take that into account for future contests.On-brandIn the Hotel Zed Kelowna lobby, mod light fixtures and low-slung couches make for an inviting atmosphere.Courtesy Hotel ZedThe promotion is meant to be playful and encourage happy, healthy sex lives, says Farmer. It’s also consistent with Hotel Zed’s brand, which is all about being different.Both the Victoria and Kelowna properties are upcycled motels decorated with a nod to the 1970s. In the Kelowna Zed, located downtown across from City Park beach on the shore of Okanagan Lake, the lobby features low-slung couches and mod light fixtures, and the bright colors of the disco decade light up the walls, upholstered chairs and throw pillows. Guests can play an ABBA album at the vinyl listening station, compose a letter home on one of two vintage typewriters, or try out a pair of the four-wheel roller skates for free. There’s even a tiny disco, complete with a fog machine, mirrored disco ball and a karaoke set up.”It’s not huge but we like to think of it as intimate,” says assistant manager Kaileigh Battah. This sentiment could describe the entire property. From the cozy living room-style nook off the lobby and inviting window seats inside the Ping Pong Lounge, to rooms with cute kitchenettes, fun color schemes and comic book reading material, it feels more like your cool friend’s retro home than a hotel. Rooms even have rotary phones and instructions that explain how to use them. Game onOne returning couple likes the special touches, including candy cigarettes on the nightstand.Courtesy Hotel ZedThe funky atmosphere and comfy bed in The Kitschy King room, Battah’s favorite, just might get contest participants into a baby-making mood. But would a winning couple want to return to Hotel Zed year after year on Valentine’s Day? For Kelowna resident Jenn Sutton and her husband the answer is yes. They’ll be checking in to Hotel Zed this February 14 for their fourth Nooner. It’s become a Valentine’s Day tradition ever since a friend bought them a gift card three years ago.”It’s a really fun vibe in the hotel and they do an outstanding job,” says Sutton. “They leave us little candy cigarettes on the nightstand, and last year there was a deck of naughty cards in case we wanted to get creative with positions.”The couple won’t be trying for a baby, however — they already have two teenagers. “We will cheer on others,” Sutton says with a laugh. Lisa Kadane is a travel and lifestyle writer based in Kelowna, British Columbia.

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The world’s longest and largest twin-engine airliner, the Boeing 777-9X, has completed its first test flight from Boeing’s wide-body factory near Seattle.

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(CNN) — For Sam Thompson, it was literally a watershed moment that came unexpectedly. The 23-year-old sales associate was traveling for work, thirsty from the plane trip, and ready to set aside his personal commitment to sustainability to gulp down water from the single-use plastic bottles he always finds in his hotel rooms.That’s when a guest services agent at Hotel SLO, a new 78-room boutique hotel in San Luis Obispo, California, blew his mind.After checking his driver’s license and swiping his credit card, the agent regaled Thompson with information about the hotel’s commitment to sustainability. She hipped him to the glass bottles of filtered water chilling in his in-room fridge. She informed him about the communal water filling stations on each of the hotel’s four floors. Then she encouraged him to use the stations as frequently as he’d like — an invitation that surprised and delighted him to no end.”I have a good practice of avoiding single-use plastics in my day-to-day, but when traveling it’s often something I find quite difficult,” he said. “To be able to have filtered water on demand every day, multiple times a day, was definitely a plus.”New ways to travel greenSan Francisco International Airport banned single-use plastics in August 2019.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America/Getty ImagesSlowly but surely, experiences like Thompson’s are becoming commonplace for travelers across the globe. At a time when people are becoming more conscious of what they can do to minimize their environmental impact, travel companies have responded by rethinking their long-standing reliance on single-use plastic amenities.These new policies and procedures have resulted in new opportunities for travelers to seek out brands with like-minded priorities and speak with their dollars and support.”Hotels are beginning to realize that there’s no silver-bullet answer to solving sustainability, and that they’ve got to be holistic to their approach to making a difference,” says Jessica Blotter, CEO and co-founder of Kind Traveler, a sustainable travel booking platform based in Malibu, California. “As consumers put more and more pressure on hotels and they have higher demands, the hotels will have to live up to the needs of their customers.”Consumers can pick sides in every argument, and this one is no exception. That means the easiest way for travelers to have a say on the plastics issue is to support companies that have cut back or are looking to do so.Demand less plasticAccor Hotels plan to use alternative materials for items including keycards, laundry bags and cups.AccorAnd it’s not just voting with their wallets, said Kelley Louise, founder and executive director of the Impact Travel Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit that advocates for sustainable travel.No. 1 on her list: Demand less plastic.Customers are in a unique position to make change in person. This means that if a hotel doles out in-room plastic water bottles, you ask for a reusable one and a place to refill it. It means rejecting tiny plastic bathroom amenities and instead requesting ones with reusable packages or no packages at all. It even means calling the front desk and asking housekeeping to replace in-room plastic cups with glasses.Louise advises logging requests with your hotel’s customer service personnel as well as the general manager. With bigger hotel chains, she adds, it pays to submit feedback directly to customer relations. (Fill out those surveys.)”The language can be simple and straightforward: ‘I’d like an alternative to what you’ve given me because I’m trying to reduce my single-use plastic footprint,'” she said. “The only way a hotel is going to know you’re unhappy about their plastic choices is if you tell them.”Another option is to share information proactively. Here, Louise cites the work of Oceanic Global, a nonprofit focused on raising awareness about the health of our oceans.The New York-based group has put together The Oceanic Standard, a free series of guides for adopting sustainable operating practices that meet both business and environmental needs. One of the guides is designed specifically for hotels and offers tools to eliminate single-use plastics from operations and to implement responsible waste management practices. Louise advocates downloading the material and leaving it behind with a property manager when you go.The plastics problemHotels aren’t washing towels and linens every day, unless guests request it. Mariana Eliano/Getty Images/fileSustainability has been a buzzword in the hotel industry for the better part of the last decade. Sometime around 2012 or so, a handful of hotels started focusing on doing good and reducing costs. These were the trailblazers who cut back on water usage by giving guests the option of using sheets and towels for multiple days, the properties that installed solar panels and converted some of their energy use to renewable sources.There are no statistics on how these efforts have worked for the industry overall, but there certainly have been success stories over the years. A 2018 report underwritten by the World Resources Institute found that for every $1 hotels invested in reducing food waste, they saved $7 in operational costs. Additional reports in recent years have indicated that LED bulbs use 75 percent less electricity than incandescent ones, meaning big savings for hotels that make the switch. Then, of course, there’s the subject of commercial water softeners, which have been proven to cut back on water usage dramatically, also keeping costs down. Marriott hotels eliminated travel-sized toiletries in August 2019.courtesy MariottOne area few hotels have addressed until recently is plastics.No matter how you look at it, plastic waste — particularly waste from single-use plastics — has become a scourge in every corner of the world.We discard more than 30 million tons of plastic a year in the United States alone, and only 8 percent is recycled, according to the Plastic Pollution Coalition.Global risk consulting firm Verisk Maplecroft recently said the average American produces more than 230 pounds of plastic waste annually.An estimated 1 million plastic water bottles are purchased every minute worldwide, according to experts affiliated with the United Nations Environment Program, who note that most of these bottles end up in the oceans, where researchers see 8 million metric tons of new plastic every year. Adding insult to injury, it could take a minimum of 450 years for the compounds that comprise plastic to break down in the ocean into their constituent molecules, scientific modeling suggests. Why should hotels care about plastic?The travel industry contributes to this problem. Single-use plastic bottles outnumber passengers at many airports and on most cruise ships. Hotels also overstock plastic in the forms of miniature toiletry bottles, individually wrapped drinking cups, key cards for room access and, of course, straws.Think about it: during overnight stays at many upscale resorts, guests receive two plastic water bottles upon check-in, two more at turn-down, and two others every time housekeepers come to clean the room.Our society has relied on plastic as a mechanism to deliver convenience, said Louise, of the Impact Travel Alliance. But trips and travel experiences don’t have to include such luxuries to be memorable, she said. “Often times it comes down to marketing and transparency and how hotels are doing things in a certain way,” she said. “There’s part of this that requires hotels to constantly explain to new visitors what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. But that’s worth it.”First, plastic strawsUntil recently, the travel industry hadn’t done much about its obsession with single-use plastics. The first step: banning plastic straws. This push intensified in 2018, when a published report estimated that as many as 8 billion straws polluted the world’s beaches. Straws became the proverbial low-hanging fruit — plastics that restaurant and hotel managers could eradicate quickly and easily. (Note: There was some blowback from people with disabilities who need straws to drink, so many restaurants now offer straws on demand.)Since then, over the past year, several big-name travel companies have doubled down on efforts to minimize plastics and maximize sustainable solutions.On January 22, Accor Hotels — with brands including Ibis, Novotel, the Fairmont and Mondrian — announced that it will replace plastic toiletry bottles with either wall dispensers or glass, bulk-sized toiletries by the end of the year. It’s also planning to use alternative materials for items including keycards, laundry bags and cups.Norwegian Cruise Line replaced has single-use plastics on all ships with paper cartons.Norwegian Cruise LineMarriott already has rolled out larger bottles at about 1,000 properties in North America, said Denise Naguib, vice president of sustainability and supplier diversity, and she expects most of its other hotels to make the switch by December 2020. When fully implemented across the globe, she says the expanded toiletry program is expected to prevent about 500 million tiny bottles annually from going to landfills — a 30 percent annual reduction from current amenity plastic usage.”We need to get people to understand that this lifestyle is having impact far beyond themselves,” Naguib told CNN in an exclusive interview immediately following the initial late August announcement. “The real question isn’t about what are we giving up, but instead about what changes we can make to recognize the bigger picture and prevent it from getting worse.” Replacing plastic on a smaller scaleOther hotels and hotel companies have had smaller wins.In Las Vegas, for instance, managers at the ultra-high-end Villas at The Mirage have been working with a company named Solus Sustainable Hydration to receive filtered water delivered daily in reusable glass bottles, milkman-style.Meanwhile, Hotel SLO, the Central California property where the glass bottle and communal refill stations had a big impact on Thompson’s travel, opened in October 2019 with no single-use plastics of any kind.On the other side of the country, in Miami, the 251-room Palms Hotel & Spa has eliminated all disposable plastics and has rolled out biodegradable cornstarch utensils for use by the pool.Accor says it will replace plastic toiletry bottles with wall dispensers or glass, bulk-sized toiletries by year’s end.AccorDirector of Marketing Tanja Morariu said these changes are just part of a renewed regional commitment to fight waste.”For us the future is all about reusables,” said Morariu, who noted that the hotel is using refillable dispensers for bathroom amenities such as eco-friendly shampoo and soap. “We believe that the less waste we can create, the less we can dispose, the better off we’ll be.”Some hotels have even emphasized phasing out plastic room keys — The Ranch in Laguna Beach, California, the state’s only National Geographic Lodge of the World, uses bamboo key cards instead of plastic. This initiative eliminated 25,000 business-card sized plastic rectangles that otherwise would eventually make their way into landfills or the Pacific Ocean.Lasting changeEducation is key, say environmental experts. The more travelers learn about single-use plastics and demand change, the faster the situation can improve, says Roland Geyer, associate professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara.”Everyone wants to buy everything and have everything and fly around the world and see amazing places and live to 100, but you can’t do all of that without creating waste and leaving behind a real footprint on the environment,” he said. “It’s time we started really thinking about our choices, and about how we’re going to make this place last.”Matt Villano, a writer and editor based in Northern California, always travels with a reusable bottle. Learn more about him at whalehead.com.

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(CNN) — Small but mighty, the state of Delaware has a long and proud history as one of the original 13 colonies, becoming a state in 1776 two months after the signing of the US Declaration of Independence. What the second-smallest US state — with a total area of just 1,982 square miles — doesn’t have right now is regular commercial airline service. It’s the only state in the union without it, according to Airports Council International, an industry trade group.Even the smallest US state, Rhode Island, has commercial flights out of T.F. Green Airport. The indignity of it all: The state’s nearly 1 million residents must drive to Philadelphia; Newark, New Jersey; Washington or other cities if they want to hop on a passenger airplane.”We are happy to offer nonstop flights to Orlando this summer, making trips to the most popular leisure destination in the US even more convenient and attractive,” Daniel Shurz, senior vice president of commercial for Frontier Airlines, said in a press release. Delaware Governor John Carney welcomed Fronter Airlines back to the state.Governor John Carney/TwitterDelaware Governor John Carney announced the airline’s return on his weekly schedule. “We’re pleased to welcome Frontier back to the State of Delaware and the Wilmington — New Castle Airport,” said Carney.”We’ve made significant infrastructure investments at the airport, and Frontier’s return will give Delawareans and travelers in the region a low-cost, convenient way to travel with their families.”It’s not clear if Delaware will be profitable for Frontier this time around, but the airline is celebrating the announcement with a $29 fare sale.

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(CNN) — The world of superyachts meets the world of aviation with this “one-of-a-kind” vessel that expertly merges aerial and nautical models.Italian shipyard Codecasa has unveiled plans for the new 230-foot superyacht concept which looks like a floating jumbo jet. Designed by owner Fulvio Codecasa, the upcoming Codecasa Jet 2020 is shaped like an aircraft and “borrows” many of its stylistic features.The end result is a huge superyacht with airplane-style rounded windows, a bow that resembles the nose of an aircraft and a forward section reminiscent of a cockpit.Aircraft characteristicsA rendering of the Codecasa Jet 2020, which is described as a “one-of-a-kind creative explosion.”Courtesy Cantieri Navali Codecasa Codecasa aims to “set a new trend in the industry” with the vessel, which is to house a huge sundeck, a swimming pool, a skylounge, a gym and a beach club with its own elevator.The superyacht will hold radar antennae installed inside carbon fiber domes “in the typical style of the AWACS airplanes,” according to a statement from Codecasa, referring to Airborne Warning And Control System long-range radars often deployed for military operations.There’s also an onboard helipad big enough to accommodate medium to large sized helicopters, as well as a pilothouse and a captain’s cabin.While its technical specifications and price are unconfirmed at this time, the building process is likely to begin later this year.Progressive projectWhile it’s unclear when the vessel will be delivered, building is due to begin later this year.Courtesy Cantieri Navali Codecasa Once the Codecasa Jet 2020 is delivered, the shipyard hope it will become the flagship of Codecasa, which was founded by Giovanni Battista Codecasa in 1825.The unconventional concept is the latest in a string of innovative superyacht projects to be announced over the past few months as designers and shipyards continue to push the boundaries as far as they can.

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