Sadhbh Warren

If you want to be an Astronaut when you grow up, you have seven days left. Want to travel somewhere off the beaten path? Sick of hearing your holiday hotspots declared “passé”? For once you can go somewhere without some world weary backpacker telling you they visited it five years ago, before it was spoiled by tourism. Virgin Blue, the Australian branch of the Virgin airline group, have put together a competition that is, quite literally, out of this world. Every time you earn frequent flyers points, you enter a competition. The prize? A trip to space. Or to be precise, enough reward points for a sub-orbital space flight with Virgin Galactic, the first airline that plans to actually send its customers into orbit. You don’t have to pick space flight. Your reward could also be a pair of Alfa Romeo cars, a shopping spree worth $170,000, or a luxury holiday worth $150,000. Velocity Rewards, the reward program of Virgin Blue, will give you twenty five million reward points to spend. It’s p...

Delta Airlines look set to start offering cheap flights with free booze from Sydney to LA, starting next month . And I, for one, won’t be booking them. Yes, you read that right. The permanently broke Irish backpacker turned Aussie, whose travel and beer spend monthly is higher than her horribly expensive Sydney rent, won’t be booking or even looking at them. Don’t get me wrong. Some of my fondest, and fuzziest, memories involve free bars. There is a place for free alcohol in both my heart and real life. I just don’t think that place is on a metal tube packed with three hundred people and only three bathrooms, whizzing through the air at 600mph. That’s over 900 kilometres an hour, for those of you too drunk to convert. The reason that you are so drunk is that the cabin pressure affects how your body deals with oxygen, meaning that a small beer can affect you like a very large one. While getting extra drunk on less might seem great, you’re getting something else for free too. You can als...