I haven’t yet had the pleasure of flying on NatureAir, but after bumping over one too many lousy roads in Costa Rica, I believe I’ll be making use of their services quite a bit next time I visit.

NatureAir launched in 2000 and has grown to the point of flying 150,000 passengers annually. It has gone from one plane and 17 employees to eight planes and more than 150 employees. In essence, it’s a short-hop airline with 74 daily flights that will get you around Costa Rica or over the border to Panama. Planes can also be chartered for small groups or families. Fares are reasonable, they have a good reputation for avoiding delays (not easy during rainy season), and their safety record is excellent.

What really makes them unique though is the stance of being the world’s first carbon neutral airline. The company says, “NatureAir offsets more than 6,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually and uses carbon credits to help conserve Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, one of the region’s most biologically diverse rainforests.” I’ve said before that Costa Rica’s government and businesses do a better job than anyone in this hemisphere of doing and not just talking when it comes to preserving the environment. It’s nice to see the main domestic airline sticking to that commitment.

For more info see www.natureair.com or call 800-235-9272.

One of our correspondents was just working on a guidebook for Costa Rica and has been keeping up with new hotels that have opened or stepped up since our first round of reviews. So we’ve been making additions to our luxury hotels in Costa Rica, including two new entries for the formerly blank Arenal Volcano area.

Making a big splash in the area is the opening of The Springs (pictured above), a striking villas-style hotel on a hillside, boasting its own hot springs, access to a river running through the region, and this:

“Secluded, exclusive, and architecturally stunning, The Springs is blessed with truly outstanding views of Arenal Volcano’s awesome and almost perfectly symmetrical lava-streaked cone, around which every superb vista in this fine hotel has been constructed.”

Follow this link for a full review of The Springs, which at press time was not completely finished. For now you can get in on opening rates.

Previously the hotel and hot springs complex known as Tabacón had the high end of the market near Arenal to itself, which from everything we heard and saw meant, “We don’t have to try very hard.” So we were hesitant to recommend the hotel, even if staying there did save you the exhorbitant admission to the hot springs (currently $45 at night or $70 for an all-day pass with lunch).

Fortunately, an ongoing renovation is more than just window dressing and the reported $2.5 million budget has been spent wisely. The lowest-priced rooms should still be avoided, but at least they now come with upgraded tech goodies.

“The most luxurious Superior Rooms do not offer Arenal views (four new suites, to be built in 2009, will combine these expanded amenities with panoramic volcano vistas), but are instead surrounded with primary rainforest, a wonder to behold from your private porch or enormous marble hot tub that dominates the impressive suites. Expansive and elegant, with handmade wooden furnishing, beautiful lighting and modern entertainment systems, these rooms render the resort truly world class.”

See the full review of Tabacón Grand Spa and Thermal Resort.

No, I’m not talking about Argentina’s brazen grab of private pensions. I’m talking about their decision to start slapping a reciprocal visa fee on visitors starting in January. It means that if your country charges the few Argentines that come to your country $134 for a visa, it will now cost the far higher number of your countrymen and women who go there just as much. Right in the midst of a global slowdown. Nice timing eh?

This hasn’t gotten much press yet since it doesn’t go in effect until January, but it’s lighting up the travel message boards. Word is also getting out on various blogs. You can read more on the Argentine Post blog or you can find some great insight from experienced guidebook writer and part-time Argentine resident Wayne Bernardson at the Southern Cone blog.

As he notes in another post, the dollar is now up bigtime in Chile and while that country also charges a reciprocity fee, they make up for it by eliminating the VAT for foreigners, effectively a 19% discount on hotels. In Argentina, by contrast, foreigners usually pay far more than the locals for hotels and domestic flights.

If you’re wealthy enough to be booking a tour that costs 30 or 40 grand you’re probably not going to bat an eye, but the message boards on FlyerTalk (not exactly a bastion of backpackers) is already filled with “I’ll go elsewhere” posts. You can just imagine what it will mean for those on a more limited budget, like a family of four deciding whether to go to Argentina and pay over $500 as a cover charge or go to Central America and pay zero.

And for some, it’s the principle of it that will make them avoid the country altogether. Yes, the government can spin this as an act of fairness, saying that since they have to pay that much so should we. All true in theory, but Argentina doesn’t have the security overhead or the big illegal immigration problem the U.S. and Canada do. Few visitors from Canada or the U.S. come to Argentina and stay on illegally to work. Then there’s the matter of how much tourism matters. The U.S. government seems to have taken an “if people come, they come, if they don’t, they don’t” attitude toward tourism and in the big scheme of things it probably hasn’t made much difference in the national economy. The domestic tourism industry is far bigger. If Argentina experiences a 30% drop in international tourism though—which is not unlikely in this climate—major crisis on top of crisis. It’s a far bigger chunk of their economy.

In a world where destinations are competing with each other for visitors, this move seems to go against any sense of logic. Each person traveling to Brazil, Chile, or Argentina will pay at least $100 for the pleasure of spending money in those countries. Meanwhile, those who visit Peru, Costa Rica, Panama, or Guatemala will pay nothing. Anyone who has to make a budget for their trip will take that into account. Reciprocity may be fair, but “fair” isn’t always “smart.”

Yes, things are very rocky in the U.S., but they’re worse elsewhere. That seems to be the reason behind the dollar’s dramatic rise against other currencies in the past few weeks.

One of the most dramatic changes has been in Chile. At the beginning of this year a dollar would have gotten you around 500 Chilean pesos. Today the official rate is 627. See the chart here from fxtop.com.

That 20 percent rise in value is not going to help you all that much with hotels priced in dollars anyway, but it does give you more bang for the buck when doing anything the locals do—like eat out in a restaurant. Or when you buy a bottle of Cabernet in a store.

Same story in Mexico, where their peso had dropped down around 10 to the dollar this summer and is now at 12.5. Again it doesn’t matter much for hotel bookings, but it affects your cost of a taxi ride, a driver for the day, a decadent seafood meal, or a domestic flight priced in pesos.

Latin America was a great value when the dollar was struggling hard against the euro and it’s an even better deal now. Head south and live it up instead of making hard decisions about your budget in Europe.

We try to review the best luxury hotels in each location we cover, but there are times when a hotel is a hidden gem and we miss it the first time around. That’s the case with Casa Palopó on Lake Atitlán. Put yourself here and say ahhhh…

We had never heard about or read about this hotel before, but our mistake. It’s been covered in Andrew Harper’s Hideaway Report and given a lavish spread in Wallpaper. The correspondent who wrote the review, Moon Handbook Guatemala author Al Argueta, says it’s his favorite place to chill in the whole country. There are just seven suites and a two-bedroom villa, all of them far more luxurious than anything else you’ll find on the shores of this lake. In fact the only hotel that even tries to offer this kind of pampering outside Antigua is La Lancha on (less picturesque) Lake Peten in the far north.

Rates start at $125 for the smallest room in low season and the master suites are $208 to $290 depending on season. Splash out in the two-suite villa for $717 to $1,099.

Our reviewer gives the restaurant here high marks and it’s surely safe to say it’s the best outside Panajachel, if not in the whole lake region. This lake is truly one of the most beautiful places this globetrotting travel writer has ever seen and just looking at the photos on their site makes me want to book a flight immediately.

Read the full review of Casa Palopo Lake Atitlan.