I was reading some online news site and came across this travel article about how a mix-up in Google News on September 8 caused United Airlines stock price to plunge from $12 to $3 per share, resulting in a loss of about $1 billion on the total stock’s value.

According to the news reports, a newspaper’s online website re-published an old article from 2002 when United Airlines filed for bankruptcy which was later picked up by Google as recent news. When the United Airlines bankruptcy article was seen by it’s stockholders the stock plummeted.

The news fascinated me and I thought you guys might enjoy it as well. Here’s some links to the story if you’d like to read more about it:

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4742147.ece
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-united-old-story-sep8,0,7800230.story
http://www.itworld.com/internet/54847/tribune-blames-google-united-stock-crash

Over the last year the U.S. dollar (USD) has continued to decline when compared to other international currencies. While this may be a good thing for travelers in other countries who come to visit the United States, it’s not as good for U.S. travelers who want to visit other countries. A weak U.S. dollar means services and goods in other countries will cost us more after we exchange our United States dollar for the local currency of the country we are visiting.

Below I took a snapshot of the 5-year exchange rate for the U.S. dollar to both the Japanese yen and the Euro. You can see that in both exchange rates we get a lot less of the countries currency for exchanging one U.S. dollar. It’s not only with these two currencies either, it’s pretty much like this across the board.

As far as when the dollar will get stronger, I don’t see this happening for awhile with the current state of the United States economy. So what’s the point of this post? I guess there really wasn’t any except bringing to attention it’s not so great a time for U.S. citizens to be traveling abroad; but on the other hand, it’s a great time for international travelers to take a trip to the United States because the exchange rates are in their favor. (While looking at exchange rates online I just thought it would make an interesting post.)