The B-29 Enola Gay is displayed at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, which is a 15-minute bus ride from Washington Dulles International Airport.

Airports aren’t known for being full of free goodies. They leverage their captive audiences to get travelers to pay for every minute you’re sitting around, whether it’s in $2.49 bags of chips or $9.99 Wi-Fi. But some airports stand out: rather than bilking and milking, they understand that travelers will want to return to a city if their first or last impression is a positive one. And what’s more positive than getting something for nothing?

Slideshow: See where all the freebies are

Free movies video games: Singapore Changi Airport
Singapore’s Changi airport is the ultimate paradise of free stuff. Terminal 3′s free movie theater screens big-name Hollywood flicks such as “X-Men: First Class,” 24 hours a day. Terminal 2 offers free Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 gaming systems. If you want to stream your own movies, there’s free Wi-Fi throughout the airport, as well as 500 free Internet kiosks. That’s only the tip of Singapore’s jumbo jet of airport entertainment, but it’ll probably keep you occupied for at least one layover.

Free Smithsonian Museum: Washington Dulles International Airport
Okay, I’m cheating a little bit: the Udvar-Hazy museum adjacent to Washington Dulles airport requires a 50-cent, 15-minute bus ride to get there. But holey moley. This blows other little “airport museums” out of the water. Iit’s a set of giant hangars stuffed with things such as an SR-71 Blackbird, the space shuttle Enterprise and the Enola Gay, which dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. They also have free tours and an observation tower where you can watch planes landing at Dulles.

Free Skype calls: Tallinn Airport, Estonia
Skype was originally written by Estonian programmers, so it’s no surprise that the country is relentlessly proud of its best-known major export. In April 2011, the first free Skype video chat booth popped up at Tallinn’s airport, and you can use it to make unlimited, free video calls anywhere in the world. If there’s too much of a line, you can try sending an email from the 14 free Internet kiosks in the airport, or hooking up your own laptop over the airport’s free Wi-Fi.

Free library: Amsterdam Airport Schiphol
The Amsterdam airport is big for layovers, and the Dutch are big on reading. Let’s combine the two! Schiphol Airport Library is a showcase for Dutch culture, with Dutch literature in translation, Dutch music and even its own Twitter feed (@airprtlibrarian). Nine of the 25 seats have iPads, as well. The library is part of “Holland Boulevard,” the cultural area of the airport which also has a (non-free) branch of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.

Free iPads: JFK International Airport, Terminals 2-3
JFK Terminal 3 is the worst airport terminal in America; it’s literally crumbling, so Delta has declared it unsalveageable and plans to demolish it. Until then: iPads! Delta has installed 200 iPads at restaurants near the gate areas. Sure, you can use them to order food, but you can also surf the Web, check your email, stream videos or find other ways to anesthetize yourself against the misery of your surroundings. (Delta has done the same at LaGuardia, another one of the nation’s worst airports.)

Free city tours: Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, Taipei
If you’re stuck in the airport for at least a few hours, the Taiwan Tourism Bureau offers free morning and afternoon tours of Taipei from Taoyuan International Airport. The morning tour hits an ancient temple and a center for pottery-making; the afternoon tour takes you to another temple, Taiwan’s tallest skyscraper and the home of Taiwan’s president. Taipei isn’t the only airport offering free city tours — Singapore’s airport also offers free city breaks.

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With apologies to Robert Burns, it’s said that the best laid plans often go awry — and nowhere is that more true than when airlines decide to upgrade or otherwise change their reservation systems.

Case in point: Cathay Pacific Airways undertook a so-called “cutover” a week ago, but is still dealing with technical issues and frustrated passengers who can’t get through to the airline to manage their travel.

For Kevin McInroy-Edwards of Portland, Ore., the snafu threatens a trip that’s been in the works for almost four years. Saving up frequent-flier miles on Cathay Pacific partner Alaska Airlines, he bought four first-class tickets for a family trip to Johannesburg, South Africa, early next month.

However, due to the way award seats are released, he had to settle for two first-class and two business-class tickets, meaning his two children, ages 10 and 11, would be in a separate class. However, he also knew that more first-class seats would be released in the weeks before their trip.

“We know the seats are there; it’s just that nobody can get them for us,” he told msnbc.com. “It’s like a ritual; we start calling at 5 a.m. and call four or five times a day, every day. Even Alaska can’t get through to them.”

As of Monday, Presidents’ Day, neither Cathay Pacific nor Alaska Airlines were available for comment, although the former’s website refers to the problem as “teething issues” affiliated with the system migration.

Passengers with near-term reservations are directed to manage their bookings online — not possible for those traveling on partner award tickets — while others are directed to call the airline “at a later date when call volumes will have subsided.”

Such instructions are of little comfort for McInroy-Edwards and others like him who have planned trips far in advance only to find their reservations caught in the switches, so to speak, of data migration. And Cathay Pacific is hardly the first carrier to run into problems during such “upgrades.”

In 2007, the merger between US Airways and America West was knocked sideways when the two carriers tried to integrate their reservation systems, crashing kiosks and stranding passengers, and just last fall, Virgin America suffered months of glitches— mysterious reservation changes, no frequent-flier access, etc. — after “upgrading” its system.

At issue are the back-end systems the airlines use to manage their reservation processes and the inherent challenges of melding multiple systems or shifting from a carrier-specific legacy program to a larger Global Distribution System (GDS), such as those operated by Amadeus or Sabre. Cathay Pacific, for example, is migrating from its own “homegrown” system to one managed by Amadeus.

Presumably, the bugs at Cathay Pacific will eventually be worked out, although travelers are advised that IT-integration will always be an issue when airlines upgrade their systems or merge them with another carrier’s.

Another case in point: On March 3, United and Continental will take the next step in their ongoing merger, when the former switches from Apollo, its current GDS, to SHARES, the system used by the latter.

Management promises a smooth transition but, as the rest of that long-ago Robert Burns poem notes, even the best-laid plans can lead to “nothing but grief and pain.”

More stories you might like:

• Travelocity tops Expedia in annual satisfaction survey
• Hate having an airplane seatmate? You have options
• Kayak enhances hotel search with TripAdvisor user reviews

Rob Lovitt is a longtime travel writer who still believes the journey is as important as the destination. Follow him at Twitter.

AirAsia X passengers who want a coach row to themselves make the request through Optiontown.com. If the traveler can be accommodated, he or she is notified four to 72 hours before departure.

Imagine: You’ve boarded your flight and are comfortable in your seat when you get a good look at, or whiff of, your seatmate coming down the aisle toward you, and you wish you could have simply reserved the entire row to yourself. Sound familiar?

By then, of course, it’s too late to buy an extra seat or, on today’s increasingly full flights, move to another row. Buying an extra seat ahead of time is an option, but the hefty cost usually convinces travelers to take their chances.

Now some airlines are giving passengers another, less expensive, option.  

Empty Seat Option, offered on AirAsia X — the long-haul, low-fare affiliate of Malaysia’ AirAsia — allows passengers  to pay a fee and request that the seat(s) next to them remain empty.

It’s not a sure thing though.

Passengers make an empty seat request online at the Optiontown, a revenue-management site, and pay both a small sign-up fee (about $1) and an Empty Seat Price that varies by flight time and destination but can be as low as $6. If empty seats are indeed available, a passenger gets a confirmation message four to 72 hours before his or her flight. If no seats are available, the empty seat price — but not the sign-up fee — is refunded a few days after the flight departs.

“We offer them the option to purchase only what is required depending on individual needs rather than bundling the cost to our fare offerings,” Azran Osman-Rani, chief executive of AirAsia X, said in a statement. He added that so far feedback about the empty seat option — and a similar upgrade program — has been positive and that other flexible options would likely be added in the near future.

Live Poll

Would you pay extra to get a whole row in coach to yourself?

“It’s about providing passengers with choice,” said Raymond Kollau, founder of airlinetrends.com, an industry and consumer research agency. “Whereas KLM’s social seating tool allows passengers in the mood for a chat to choose their seatmate, AirAsia X gives those passengers who like to have the row to their own an option to purchase it. It’s just a matter of preference.”

A few other airlines offer a similar product. At check-in, Air New Zealand’s Twin Seat option gives passengers the chance to buy the seat next to them for a significantly reduced price. Spain’s Vueling offers a second-seat option, called Duo, as well.

“The option provides peace of mind to passengers who [don’t have to] bet on the seat shuffle that takes place after the aircraft has lifted off,” said Kollau.

Optiontown also offers an Upgrade Travel Option on 10 airlines, including AirAsia X, Aeromexico, SAS, Air India and others.

Shashank Nigam, CEO of SimpliFlying, a company specializing in airline branding and customer engagement, said it’s a positive program. “It’s a great way to up-sell distressed inventory and also give customers a sense of what the premium product is like.” 

More stories you might like:

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Find more by Harriet Baskas on StuckatTheAirport.com and follow her on Twitter.

Squeezed between travel providers on one side and meta-search sites on the other, it seems online travel agencies (OTAs) have one ace in the hole: Consumers still like using them.

That’s the upshot of a new American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) report released on Tuesday. Focusing on Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline and Travelocity, the report rated overall satisfaction with the sites at 78 on a 100-point scale last year, matching the record high set the year before.

“A score of 78 is good,” said Larry Freed, CEO and president at ForeSee, which helps produce the Index. “We consider 80 the threshold for a great performing site and they’re bumping up right against it.”

While the aggregate score was unchanged, individual results showed more fluctuation. After nine years in the top spot, Expedia slipped 3 percent, from 79 points to 77, losing its crown to Travelocity, which climbed from 77 to 79.

Orbitz and Priceline also posted better numbers, rising from 75 to 76 and 73 to 76, respectively.

Speaking anecdotally, Freed says Travelocity may have gotten a boost after it redesigned its homepage last summer.

“It’s a bit more of a guided navigation — Step 1, Step 2, Step 3 — as opposed to just filling out a form,” he told msnbc.com. “We don’t know explicitly if that’s the reason it improved, but it’s definitely a fresher, cleaner look.”

Changes at Priceline may also explain that site’s improved rating. In recent years, the company has gradually moved away from its opaque, “Name Your Own Price” focus toward a more traditional OTA model. (In January, the company even went so far as to kill off the Priceline Negotiator, the celebrity spokesman played by William Shatner.)

“They’re now more in sync with everybody else,” said Freed. “Knowing what you’re getting is probably a little more palatable for a larger base of consumers.”

Still, as a group, the OTAs face fundamental challenges because they all serve a similar role as middlemen to the travel providers whose inventory they sell.

“Loyalty is an issue,” said Diane Clarkson, e-business analyst with Forrester Research Inc. “In a sense, the OTAs have replaced search engines. So many travelers will start with an OTA for their research but then book on a supplier site.”

To counter that, Clarkson expects the OTAs to get increasingly proactive toward customer service through the use of newer technologies. More and better use of virtual agents and live chat, for example, may help keep users from clicking over to Budget, Marriott or United when it’s time to buy.

Another option would be to provide more benchmark data to alleviate price anxiety, says Carroll Rheem, director of research at PhoCusWright. “A lot of travelers still feel the need to shop around to make sure they’re really getting a good deal,” she told msnbc.com.

To alleviate some of that anxiety, Rheem points to the way financial companies display info: “They show historical prices, averages against the competition, things that give people a sense of the lay of the land.”

Generally speaking, though, she agrees that the OTAs are doing a good job of satisfying their customers.

 “We’re not seeing very high percentages for frustration factors,” she said. “It’s more about the tweaking and fine-tuning at this point.”

More stories you might like:

• Kayak enhances hotel search with TripAdvisor user reviews
• Southwest hikes fares by $10, other carriers follow
• Swap those unwanted gift cards for United miles

Rob Lovitt is a longtime travel writer who still believes the journey is as important as the destination. Follow him at Twitter.

There are healthier, tastier options than pizza at many airports these days.

I don’t have the statistics handy, but my guess is that on average, 99.9 percent of the people running around airport concourses are not there for the food.

That’s not to say dining options haven’t gotten exponentially better. We can all remember the days when the only organic products at airports would get you in trouble with the DEA. Now you can find entire kiosks filled with products to delight your cardiologist right next to gate C16. So let’s start with the good news.

The Good 

Tortas Frontera – O’Hare International Airport, Chicago
No kidding, Frontera makes you cross your fingers for delays at O’Hare. Rick Bayless, the Chicago-based champion of Mexican cooking, now has two airport branches, both with awesome griddled tortas (sandwiches).

Bar Brace — Laguardia Airport, New York City
Finally, retaliation for all those nasty airport sandwiches. Jason Denton, owner of the world’s sweetest wine bar, ‘ino in NYC’s West Village, offers his exemplary panini.

Great Lakes Brewing Company — Cleveland Hopkins International Airport
You know you’re going to drink whatever you can get your hands on at the airport before your flight. So you might as well drink a really good local microbrew.

The Much Less Good

Just because airport food has generally gotten better doesn’t mean you can’t find dishes that would earn you a spot on my unrealized TV show, “I Ate This and Survived.” It’s no fun to name chain names (well it is and you should guess them). We’ll go by category.

Airport pizza
Spinach and broccoli are normally healthy. Except, apparently, at chain airport pizza places where they’re stuffed into a slice for a total of 790 calories and 34 grams of fat. That’s modest compared to the almost-1000-calorie stuffed sausage pepperoni pizza, which boasts 47 fat grams.

Airport cinnamon rolls
I’m waiting for a celebrity to release a fragrance that captures that sickeningly good, sweet scent of airport cinnamon rolls. Until then, you just have to eat one of these frosting-covered rolls and watch the 880 calories and 36 grams of fat stack up.

Airport nachos
I’ve previously expressed wonder at “volcano nachos,” which come topped with both warm nacho sauce and cheesy molten hot lava sauce. Interestingly, they’re served with low-fat sour cream. What? Please order extra, full-fat sour cream on the side to take the dish right over the 980 calorie/60 grams-of-fat mark.

Airport Chinese food
Because you can customize your order at these places, it’s possible to get the following three-entrée plate: Cream cheese rangoons (crisp wonton skins filled with cream cheese – crisp being code for deep fried), honey-doused walnut shrimp (more fried, this time with a very sweet coating); and orange chicken (more fried, with a different very sweet coating). If you’re sick of counting up fat grams –
and you’re in higher math territory with that entrée -– consider the BBQ pork, which has 1,310 milligrams of sodium.

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Once you have finally dropped your bags at your destination, the next 24 hours of any trip can be both thrilling and completely disorienting. Having a plan for getting things done and getting your trip truly underway upon arrival can set the tone for an entire vacation. Here are 10 tips for dispatching potential snags in the first 24 hours of your trip.

1. On the way in, plan your exit.
The best time to figure out the fastest and easiest way out of town is on your way in; waiting until you are trying to make a plane to do so can cause a lot of stress and lost time. After you get off a plane, for example, scope out the airport layout and amenities. Note how far it is from the car rental counter to the terminal as well as a good place to buy gas to fill up your tank before returning your vehicle. Look for street names and exit numbers to thread your way back to the rental counter or terminals. When you check in at your hotel, ask about check-out times and see if you can leave without stopping at the front desk.

2. Grab some nourishment.
One of the first things most travelers will need to do upon arriving in a new place is eat, and many end up grabbing whatever is available, whether it’s room service or fast food. But with Yelp, Urbanspoon, TripAdvisor, and many other listing sites and apps out there, you can get ahead of this one very easily.

Reader Tre Horoszewski offers a tip: “Do a little research ahead of time to find a decent, nearby restaurant for your first meal upon arrival. You’re often tired and hungry, so aren’t ready to go to that one really great place you want to try on your trip. But neither do you want to spend time looking for someplace and wind up settling for junk precisely because you’re tired and hungry and just want food.”

Of course, in some cases fast food will do the job just fine. 

3. Reset your clock.
If you changed time zones while traveling, you will want to assume the daily rhythms of the new zone immediately, right down to the type of foods you eat. If it is morning, go have tea or coffee and breakfast foods (pancakes, pastries, etc.); if it is evening, have a proper dinner; if it is nighttime, maybe a cocktail and a snack. Don’t succumb to the urge to stay on your old schedule, especially for your most ingrained habits — which brings us to…

4. Get outside.
When you visit a new place, the light is different, the air is different and your entire sense of the world can be different. After spending hours in parking lots, airports, planes, shuttle buses and rental car garages, put down all your stuff and get out the door.

Ceci Flinn, an American working toward a Ph.D. at Oxford in the U.K., offers the following: “Take a walk, familiarize yourself with the surroundings and get fresh air/exercise. Okay, there are places like parts of L.A. where this doesn’t work so well, and ya gotta take a bus or drive, and then walk!”

Do this again the morning after you arrive; getting yourself out into the sunlight alerts your brain and body to what time of day it is, and lets them know that you’re done sitting on planes and ready to have some fun! (See More Tips for Fighting Jet Lag.) 

5. Have a plan to deal with your caffeine addiction.
Face it, a very large percentage of Americans have a caffeine addiction of some type; getting this under control and on track as quickly as possible is going to be critical in adjusting your biological clock to match your new surroundings. If you mess it up in the early going, it can take days to correct, and even exact a toll on your overall enjoyment of your trip.

Anyone with a coffee habit of any merit knows the consequences of having a strong cup of coffee at the wrong time of day. If it’s 7 a.m. in your home town but late in the day at your new destination, you know that giving your body the java fix it’s demanding will wreak havoc on your sleep that night and your energy the next day. But you also know you can’t go completely without.

I have found that substituting a sugarless cola often does the trick; with less than 50 milligrams of caffeine in most colas, it is enough to push back headaches and cravings, but not so much to ruin your sleep.

Then when you get up the next day, get out of your room into the morning sunlight and hit the caffeine hard; I have found that this combination can reset your internal clock almost in an instant. You may have a different approach — and an evening cup of coffee may have little effect on some people — but you want to put a strategy into play before you find yourself lying awake in the dark on a midnight caffeine jag.

A simpler version: Wait until your first morning to drink your first strong cup of coffee.

6. Take pictures.
A pro photographer I know always dedicates the first few hours of a trip to taking a lot of photos; he noticed some time ago that his eye was always “freshest” when he first arrived in a new place, and he would notice things in the first few hours that he might ignore after a few days. Flynn says simply, “Take a camera; you never know when you will see something magical.”

7. Charge your electronics.
When you arrive in your room, the first thing you want to do is whip out all your electronic devices, make sure you can plug them in if you are traveling internationally and put a full charge on them. If you need adapters, you will want to deal with this early in your trip; having your laptop or camera bail out on you right after you arrive can make the normal hassles of traveling overwhelm the first promising hours of your trip.

8. Secure your valuables.
The place you stow your most valuable items during a flight (in your carry-on, in your coat pocket) may not be the safest place for the duration of your trip. If you are traveling with any especially valuable items, secure them straight away upon arrival, whether in the safe in your room, or buried deep in your socks, or however you prefer to do so.

9. Let someone know you arrived, and where you are.
Especially if you are traveling alone, but even if not, it’s a good idea to let someone close to you know that you arrived safely, and tell him or her how to get in touch with you if needed (hotel phone and room number, your preferred traveling e-mail address, a local cell phone if you purchase one, etc.).

10. Check the weather.
It seems almost too simple, but countless travelers get ambushed by bad weather, and a thoughtful weather check can really assist your overall planning. Check the long-term forecast for your stay, which will help you decide when to schedule outdoor vs. indoor activities, whether you will need to pick up gear that you didn’t pack, and how to cope with any truly plan-wrecking weather events.

More from IndependentTraveler.com

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Even novice players of the airline mileage-program game know how to earn extra frequent flier miles through shopping, dining, hotel stays and car rentals.

Now there’s one more way to feather the free-trip nest: On Monday, United Continental Holdings launched the MileagePlus Gift Card Exchange, a program that allows members of United and Continental airlines’ MileagePlus program to swap unwanted gift cards from more than 60 major retailers for miles.

“The program enables members to get value out of gift cards that they normally wouldn’t use or didn’t want,” said United spokesperson Charles Hobart. The airline claims the program is the “first of its kind.”

To swap cards, MileagePlus members log into their accounts and enter the value and other information from an unwanted gift card. The site will verify the card, make an exchange offer in miles and, if the offer is accepted, “take” the card and, within about five days, deposit miles in a member’s account.

There are some restrictions: Cards with balances below $25 will not qualify, nor will cards that have expiration dates. And not all cards will be accepted or exchanged for face value. “Our rates are determined by market pricing, which is affected by several factors,” the program rules state. Those factors determining a card’s value aren’t fully spelled out and the rules note that the mileage offer displayed for the same gift may fluctuate over time.

 “This looks like a modest win for MileagePlus members, who now have yet another option for using their miles,” said Tim Winship, publisher of FrequentFlier.com, a site about airline-mileage programs. “But without a set exchange rate when converting card balances into frequent flier miles, it’s impossible to assess the real value of such exchanges except on a case-by-case basis.”

Winship says that floating exchange rates will likely detract from the new feature’s popularity, as could the 7.5 percent federal excise tax he suspects will show up as a reduction in the number of miles members receive for any exchange.

“If the exchange rates are generous enough, the tax hit may not matter,” said Winship. “But for those drawn to the program for its convenience, it’s probably a non-issue” and will likely be a feature other airlines and hotels may soon add to their programs.

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