Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide today announced that it would spend almost $3 billion during the next several years to revitalize its Sheraton Hotels & Resorts brand, including renovations, new properties and other hotel initiatives.

The plan calls for upgrades to 100 hotels in the United States, about half of its North American portfolio. The $1.3 billion slated for renovations will involve renovating 50,000 guest rooms and redesigning more than 100 new lobbies. “We are leveraging Starwood’s proven history of building great lifestyle brands to enhance the entire guest experience for the company’s most global, recognized brand,” Sheraton senior vice president Hoyt Harper II said in a statement.

Elements of the new room design include movable desk space, flat-screen televisions and a charging station for guests’ electronics. The bathrooms will be refurbished with new lighting, a freestanding vanity and water-saving plumbing fixtures. Closets will be replaced with wood-paneled wardrobes.

Lobby renovations will include a new communications hub with free wireless Internet access and Internet-enabled computer stations, as well as a centrally located communal table for group work. Sheraton said it will alter lighting and other design elements to create more of a feel of the outdoors.

Starwood also plans to spend $2 billion in new hotel openings over the next few years. The brand currently has 406 hotels in 71 countries, slightly less than half of Starwood’s overall portfolio of about 900 properties.

Heathrow airport’s new Terminal 5 opened for business today with the first flight arriving just before 5am, but what else is there to know about the £4.3bn structure?

• The new terminal covers the area of 50 football pitches. Including its satellites, taxiways and aircraft stands, it is equivalent in size to Hyde Park, London

• The amount of earth shifted during construction of T5 would have filled Wembley stadium one and half times.

• The terminal is designed to handle 35 million people a year at capacity – equivalent to the population of Lincoln - every day of the year.

• 60,000 people were involved in making the new terminal – enough to fill Arsenal’s Emirates football stadium.

• The UK’s biggest single-site dig unearthed 80,000 items including pots, cups, buckets, flints and a hand axe dating back to 3,000BC .

• T5 has 11 miles of baggage conveyor belt, with late-running bags being sent on a separate fast-track conveyor.

• T5’s baggage system can deal with 12,000 bags an hour — roughly double BA’s baggage capacity at T1 and T4.

• The road, rail, underground and drainage tunnels are equivalent in length to a third of the Channel tunnel’s underwater section.

• The T5 public inquiry was the longest in UK history, lasting four years from 1995 - 1999.

• During construction, two rivers were diverted around the T5 site. Fish and other water creatures were moved before the diversion, and the new channels were made habitable for wildlife.

The Dominion Post says that Kiwis flying across the Tasman could soon be getting through airports more quickly with the help of automatic passport-reading machines as New Zealand and Australian travellers with electronic passports will be able to put themselves through passport control without having to queue.

Passengers put their passports into a machine similar to a ticket kiosk that downloads details, including an electronic image of the passport holder’s face.

Passengers are then given a coupon for a gate, at which cameras and computers using facial recognition technology do the checks done till now by customs officers.

Customs comptroller Martyn Dunne said New Zealanders had been able to use the SmartGate at Brisbane Airport since late last year and the system would soon be set up in Sydney.

Similar machines would be tested in Wellington in the next few months and he expected the system would be available for all trans-Tasman travel in time for the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

At first it would be available only to New Zealanders and Australians with electronic passports but he expected it would later be available to those from other countries.

Travellers would still have to go through the airport baggage-checking system and some people would still be pulled aside.

“All this is processing people and takes away the necessity to handle everybody in a one-to-one contact,” Mr Dunne said.

New Zealanders and Australians accounted for 60 per cent of all trans-Tasman passengers and it would streamline the procedure for most people.

What is SmartGate?

SmartGate is an electronic passport control system that automatically checks that travellers are who they say they are and does the routine immigration and customs checks everyone is put through when arriving at the border. It should reduce airport queues.

How does it work?

The SmartGate kiosk reads data, including an electronic photo on the microchip embedded in electronic passports issued since 2005. Computers use facial recognition technology to verify the passenger’s identity. If they match, passengers go through automatically - if not, they have to be checked by a customs officer.

A Report by The Mole from The Dominion Post

Singapore Airlines and its regional wing, SilkAir, will introduce changes to their excess baggage charges, replacing the current published-fare based rates.

From 1 April 2008, excess baggage charges will be levied by way of a zonal system, based on the originating region and the disembarking region:

* All rates in S$, per kilogram of excess baggage

Band 1 : South-East Asia
Band 2 : Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Maldives, and The Indian Subcontinent
Band 3 : South-West Pacific, Japan, Korea, the Middle East
Band 4 : Africa and Europe

The new system applies to all travel itineraries that do not involve the North America region, including interline travel, with Singapore Airlines or SilkAir as the first flight segment.

Currently, customers are charged 1.5 percent of the highest one-way published economy fare for each excess kg. The exact amounts are typically determined only at the check-in counters. With this new policy, customers will be able to work out, even before they arrive at the airport, the extra cost they would incur if they wish to travel with more baggage then their checked allowance.

Exceptions to this new policy are itineraries between Dubai and Moscow, and Dubai and Istanbul. Excess baggage charges for these itineraries will be levied at S$30 per kilogram.

For itineraries involving the North America region, the allowed weight for each bag will be reduced from 32kg (70lb) to 23kg (50lb). Customers will still continue to enjoy a two-piece free allowance. Excess baggage will be continued to be levied on a per-piece basis, variable based on point of departure.

For more information, please visit singaporeair.com and silkair.com.