Southwest wants to resell your seat, games with Google Maps, get paid to move to Tuscany, snowy owls at BOS, and the hobby goes mainstream (Saturday Selection)

Throughout the week, our team shares articles they’ve stumbled upon that may interest our readers, even if they might not otherwise merit a full post. Here are some of the posts we found interesting this week: Southwest wants to resell your seat, games with Google Maps, get paid to move to Tuscany, snowy owls at BOS, and the hobby goes mainstream.

Southwest Will Pay You to Switch Flights—So It Can Resell Your Seat for More [Roundup]

We all understand the concept of getting bumped when a flight is oversold, but Southwest has decided they will start giving you the opportunity to switch to a less heavily booked flight ahead of time, so that it can resell your seat at a higher price. (Gary’s article touches on this briefly, but you can read more about it here.) The idea is to increase revenue, ideally without inconveniencing travelers, since some may prefer to switch to a less crowded flight. However, we’ve heard at least one account of someone who accidentally switched to a flight 3 days and 1 hour later.

Every Trick a Pro GeoGuessr Player Uses to Win (ft. RAINBOLT) | WIRED

Trevor Rainbolt only started traveling in the last few years, so why is he so good at identifying destinations by simply glancing at a Google Street View screenshot for literally a split second? It’s all thanks to the countless hours he’s logged playing a computer game called GeoGuessr (my newest obsession and the remedy to doom scrolling). GeoGuessr is a game that drops you in a random location on Google Maps street view, then gives you ~90 seconds to drop a pin on the map with a guess where you think you are. Pros like Rainbolt have made themselves experts in everything you can imagine appearing on a Google Maps screen. For example, he knows exactly what kinds of telephone poles appear in which parts of the world, which kinds of bollards you’ll see in which countries, and what the soil looks like in one part of the world compared to another. He’s also memorized things like what years the Google Car last visited a certain country, or how high above the Google Car the camera was sitting in a particular place. (Or even which country had bugs on the camera at the time of the Google Car’s filming.)

There are apparently websites out there to help you study up on all of these GeoGuessr tricks, but for me, it’s just as fun to use my own memory bank instead, and test out how much of the world’s geography I might be able to recognize from my own travels. Unfortunately, GeoGuessr only gives you three free guesses a day, but there are free alternatives like Openguessr, which lets you compete with another player and play as much as you want for free. See if you find it as addictive as I do!

Want to move to Tuscany? This picturesque village is paying people $23,000 to move there

This is the kind of relocation incentive program that’s bound to work for someone, but not just anyone. The Tuscan village of Radicondoli (about 40 minutes outside of Siena) is offering up to $23,000 in subsidies to those who want to buy a home, or even rent. (As you may recall, I’m a participant in a similar program here in West Virginia.) Just like the Ascend WV program, the program aims to resolve a critical population decline problem. It sounds idyllic enough – a historical Italian village that even uses geothermal energy. However, in order to qualify, you have to be willing to stick around for 4 years if renting, and 10 years if buying. This is a more significant commitment than the 2 years required by the program I’m a part of. You can learn more details here.

Why Are There Snowy Owls at Logan Airport?

The Boston Logan Airport is a very familiar one to our Nick, as it became a major transit zone for his JetBlue 25 for 25 promotion pursuits this Fall. Apparently, it’s also a major point of visitation for as many as 100+ snowy owls each Fall and Winter. These giant owls travel south from the Arctic when food gets scarce, and, according to the man who has made researching this phenomenon his job, they like the Tundra-like environment of the Boston Logan airport. In a way, it reminds them of their home up North. But an airport is not always a safe environment for these creatures, so Norman Smith has also made it his job to capture and relocate these birds when they show up. He estimates that he’s captured somewhere around 900 of them since he started this in 1981. But sometimes they don’t want to be relocated, and they’ll just come right back. One owl named Salisbury returned to the airport 4 weeks after his release, but a dominant female was sort of controlling the area by then. She would share her airport territory during the day, then kick all the other owls out at night. (Sounds like kind of a character). So Salisbury had to settle for the Chinatown area downtown, where he would eat rats outside of a restaurant. How absolutely storybook and dystopian at the same time – I love it.

New York Times digs into credit card churning (find a gifted version of the link here)

Has “credit card churning” gone mainstream? A recent New York Times article spells out the very basics of this hobby we know so well, introducing to the general public the notion of signing up for credit cards for their lucrative welcome offers. The article aims to shock readers by introducing a man who’s opened “more than 50 credit cards”, receiving various welcome offers which have “netted his family more than $40,000”. (Does that hit close to home at all for any of you?) The article refers to these characters as part of the “churning community”. (Is that a term any of us are actually using, I wonder?) While the article itself won’t seem the least bit groundbreaking to this crowd, it is interesting to see a mainstream news outlet broaching this subject at all.

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