5 destinations worth exploring this Labor Day weekend
Labor Day weekend (August 30 - September 2) is your last chance to get away before summer unofficially ends. Here are five destinations worth exploring this holiday weekend.
Chicago
Chicago may be the “City of Big Shoulders," but Chicagoans don't just know how to work hard. They play hard, too, especially while celebrating Labor Day at several festivals throughout the long weekend. At the 41st annual Chicago Jazz Festival, you'll enjoy 46 free performances at four outdoor venues scattered around Millennium Park. The Great American Lobster Fest has live lobsters flown in from the East Coast and about two dozen live bands performing at Navy Pier. Or you can hit one of the smaller festivals: the North Coast Music Festival in Union Park, the African Festival of the Arts in Washington Park or the Taste of Polonia in Jefferson Park featuring all things Polish.
Virginia Beach
The 26th annual American Music Festival has one particular thing that helps it stand out from most major music festivals — it's on the beach in one of the East Coast's best beach cities. Headliners taking the main stage are 311, Lee Brice, +Live+ and Dashboard Confessional. Just down the shore at three other beach-park stages are free nightly performances by a variety of rock, country and party bands. During the day you can do the same thing, minus the music — go to the beach.
San Francisco
Drained by the long, sweaty days of summer? San Francisco is cooled by summer fog and ocean breezes, so it's rarely hot on Labor Day weekend. Average high: 69 degrees. Besides exploring the city's museums and attractions each day, and taking an exhilarating boat ride under the Golden Gate Bridge, you can hike up from the Italian North Beach neighborhood to Coit Tower with its memorable view and historic murals that tell the story of local labor-movement struggles. Just across the bay, the 67th annual Sausalito Art Festival features daily live music on two stages.
Seattle
Seattle features the same ocean-cooled mild weather of San Francisco, plus the blessing of a superb Labor Day-weekend music festival like Virginia Beach's. The festival is Bumbershoot, one of America's biggest contemporary music and arts festivals. Performers this year include The Lumineers and Lizzo. The celebration of music, comedy, dance, film, performing arts, visual arts and literary arts brings big crowds to its venues at Seattle Center, home of the Space Needle, near downtown.
Aspen
There are no ocean breezes, but the 8,000-foot altitude keeps it pleasantly cool on Labor Day weekends at the mountain resort of Aspen Snowmass. Making it even cooler on Labor Day weekend is the Jazz Aspen Snowmass festival, where headliners Weezer, John Mayer and Sting make it obvious that the festival has expanded far beyond jazz. The surrounding mountains inspire visitors to see more of them from a hot-air balloon, rented mountain bike or hiking trail between concerts.
In need of last-minute flight, book your travel at united.com or by using the convenient United app.
Chicago
Chicago may be the “City of Big Shoulders," but Chicagoans don't just know how to work hard. They play hard, too, especially while celebrating Labor Day at several festivals throughout the long weekend. At the 41st annual Chicago Jazz Festival, you'll enjoy 46 free performances at four outdoor venues scattered around Millennium Park. The Great American Lobster Fest has live lobsters flown in from the East Coast and about two dozen live bands performing at Navy Pier. Or you can hit one of the smaller festivals: the North Coast Music Festival in Union Park, the African Festival of the Arts in Washington Park or the Taste of Polonia in Jefferson Park featuring all things Polish.
Virginia Beach
The 26th annual American Music Festival has one particular thing that helps it stand out from most major music festivals — it's on the beach in one of the East Coast's best beach cities. Headliners taking the main stage are 311, Lee Brice, +Live+ and Dashboard Confessional. Just down the shore at three other beach-park stages are free nightly performances by a variety of rock, country and party bands. During the day you can do the same thing, minus the music — go to the beach.
San Francisco
Drained by the long, sweaty days of summer? San Francisco is cooled by summer fog and ocean breezes, so it's rarely hot on Labor Day weekend. Average high: 69 degrees. Besides exploring the city's museums and attractions each day, and taking an exhilarating boat ride under the Golden Gate Bridge, you can hike up from the Italian North Beach neighborhood to Coit Tower with its memorable view and historic murals that tell the story of local labor-movement struggles. Just across the bay, the 67th annual Sausalito Art Festival features daily live music on two stages.
Seattle
Seattle features the same ocean-cooled mild weather of San Francisco, plus the blessing of a superb Labor Day-weekend music festival like Virginia Beach's. The festival is Bumbershoot, one of America's biggest contemporary music and arts festivals. Performers this year include The Lumineers and Lizzo. The celebration of music, comedy, dance, film, performing arts, visual arts and literary arts brings big crowds to its venues at Seattle Center, home of the Space Needle, near downtown.
Aspen
There are no ocean breezes, but the 8,000-foot altitude keeps it pleasantly cool on Labor Day weekends at the mountain resort of Aspen Snowmass. Making it even cooler on Labor Day weekend is the Jazz Aspen Snowmass festival, where headliners Weezer, John Mayer and Sting make it obvious that the festival has expanded far beyond jazz. The surrounding mountains inspire visitors to see more of them from a hot-air balloon, rented mountain bike or hiking trail between concerts.
In need of last-minute flight, book your travel at united.com or by using the convenient United app.
"The parts of the travel experience that we all take for granted like checking luggage, getting your flight status and accessing a boarding pass can still be a challenge for someone with a visual disability," said EVP of Technology and Chief Digital Officer Linda Jojo. "These new accessibility enhancements are part of our continuing commitment to level the playing field, unlock all the customer benefits of our app and give people with disabilities more independence while traveling."
Senior Accessibility Analyst Ray Campbell is a member of United's digital team who's visually impaired and sits on the board of the American Council of the Blind. He played a key role in helping us redesign the app. He even put the app to the test as seen in this video.
"Optimizing mobile apps for tools such as VoiceOver and TalkBack has been a game changer, allowing people with visual disabilities to fully utilize smartphone technology in their daily lives," said Ray. "It's just as important for someone with a visual disability to easily access day-of-travel information and features as for any other customer. Improving the accessibility of the United app, helps us truly live out United's mission of caring for all customers."
Beyond the accessibility changes, our digital team enhanced the current offering while keeping the features that helped the app win a Webby People's Voice award in 2019.
- For our MileagePlus® program members, the app now features a refreshed account experience for members to easily check balances, track Premier® progress, explore MileagePlus benefits, access past activity and more, all in one place.
- The airline is also expanding a popular feature previously only accessible to MileagePlus members. Now, all 37 million customers who have the United app will see a contextualized home screen starting 48 hours before their flight which provides dynamic updates based on where a customer is in their travel journey. For example, customers can see the boarding status of their flight on their homescreen, access personal device entertainment onboard with one click, find a link to a map with gate-to-gate directions for connecting flights and click a quick access button to track any checked bags upon arrival.
- We made slight tweaks to navigation based on customer feedback to make the app more intuitive, including making the bottom navigation persistent throughout the app. Another example is the "More" menu, which was reorganized and now contains the "Inbox" feature, which includes timely messages about boarding announcements, gate changes and other travel updates.
- Customers will notice a new color palette that's consistent with the refreshed branding the airline debuted in 2019. United's digital team also made subtle design adjustments to make things more consistent and easier to find, like always using a purple bar to highlight the main call-to-action on a page and ensuring alerts and flight status icons appear the same way in every page on the app.
- All of these changes are underpinned by a new back-end platform, which will ultimately make the app faster and more responsive.
The redesigned app is now available to download for iPhone®, iPad® and iPod touch® devices (as an iPhone app) and for Android devices.
