In the “no surprises here” category, a survey conducted by TripAdvisor found that travelers mostly avoid hotel minibars because of sky-high prices, not selection. This subject is top of mind for me right now as I just stayed in a hotel in Costa Rica that had $2.50 beers and $1.50 sodas in its minibar. So I used it quite a bit. Meanwhile, I saw an article in Travel & Leisure talking about a Paris hotel that had $9 bottles of water in its minibar. Who pays that?

Not many people, apparently. “Price, not selection, is the most important factor when it comes to using the mini-bar, as 94 percent of all travelers surveyed would use the mini-bar more often, if the prices were more reasonable. Thirty-three percent of travelers said they never hit the mini-bar.”

Personally, I’ve never understood the logic of charging more for an item in the minibar than it goes for in the real bar in the hotel. In the real bar you’ve got labor costs, additional space requirements, furniture, and lots of other aspects that contribute to the cost of a drink. In a hotel room you’ve got none of that and the guest does all the work. There’s just the cost of electricity for the fridge. (Which is completely wasted in most cases since guests just balk at the price and don’t use it at all.)

And in a move that had to be dreamed up by an accountant rather than someone who faces guests, mini bars with motion sensors are more trouble. “With the advent of motion and weight sensors, 16 percent of travelers have been billed for simply adding items to a hotel room mini-bar/fridge or for moving contents around. Seven percent have been charged for merely storing their own items in a mini-bar/fridge.”

We recently posted our reviews of the top 5 hotels in Los Cabos, at the bottom tip of the Baja Peninsula of Mexico. Our correspondent quickly dismissed some of the so-called luxury hotels in Los Cabos, but dished out high praise for some of the ones that are truly special. Although I try not to take magazine readers’ polls too seriously, I was happy to see that some of our top picks’ spas were highly praised in the April issue of Conde Nast Traveler. The poll rated the top spas in North America, the Caribbean, and at sea.

Esperanza in Cabo San Lucas earned a perfect score for both its setting and its treatments. Las Ventanas al Paraiso in Los Cabos also earned a perfect score for its setting and was #6 overall for resort spas.

I was surprised to see One & Only Palmilla miss the cut, but an ad in the middle of the section praising the magazine’s Johansens Awards for Excellence listed One and Only Palmilla as the “Most Excellent Resort”in Mexico and Central America. (Marquis Los Cabos was a runner-up in that section, along with Royal Hideaway Playacar, on the other coast.)

According to the National Association of Realtors, vacation home sales in the U.S. hit a record of 1.07 million homes in 2006. What’s a little scary about this number is that “the share of second-home sales was 36% of all existing and new residential real estate transactions in 2006.” More than a few of those were speculators buying investment property to fix up or flip, but still…

There’s been a lot of talk about a housing bubble bursting, which so far hasn’t been too painful in most areas (parts of Florida and California experiencing the worst), but many intrepid investors are finding much better values outside the U.S. Even in parts of Mexico that you could argue are overheated, such as Puerto Vallarta and San Miguel de Allende, prices are still half or less what they would be north of the border. Often the workmanship is far better as well, with things like custom tile work and swimming pools made to order.

If you are more of a pioneer, you can find even better real estate deals abroad and have almost no downside risk. We’ll be covering specific markets here and on the pages of Luxury Latin America later, but there are some enticing value plays in Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Panama, and others. The median price paid for a vacation home in the U.S. in 2006 was $200,000. Open up your definition of what a second home can be and you might end up buying two or three houses for the price of one in the U.S. or Canadian location you were considering…