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The US order prohibiting passengers from carrying laptop computers and other electronics into the cabins of some overseas flights is raising concerns about a risk unrelated to terror: the potential for those devices’ lithium-based batteries to catch fire in the baggage hold. The Flight Safety Foundation Friday urged the industry to take steps not to “introduce another risk” from the highly flammable batteries powering the electronics. The concern is that passengers are being told to place electronic devices into cargo holds just as international safety agencies have begun barring bulk shipments of rechargeable lithium cells because of evidence that they can spontaneously catch fire and even explode. The US FAA logged 31 cases last year in which lithium-based batteries either caught fire or smouldered on airline flights. <br/>

Two-thirds of travel booking websites provide misleading information on prices and so breached EU consumer protection rules, the EC said Friday. In its survey of 352 online travel booking and comparison services, it found a third of the websites displayed initial prices which were not the final prices and in a fifth of the cases promotional offers were not really available. About 1 in 4 websites also misled consumers by saying there were only a limited amount of seats or rooms left at a certain price, when this often only applied to the website in question. The Commission did not name any of the companies surveyed in its screening of websites across the bloc in Oct 2016. The EU executive said the websites that were in breach of EU consumer protection rules and could take legal action if the companies failed to improve. <br/>