Ask a group of luxury leisure travelers or entrepreneurs what there biggest pet peeve is with luxury hotels and a majority will spit out one thing without having to think about it: getting charged for wireless Internet access. Yet like airlines that know they’re pissing off their customers with fuel surcharges and baggage fees, the big luxury chains keep at it anyway because they’re addicted to the additional revenue. Corporate travelers pay it without blinking because it’s not their money—the company is covering it. So in hotels with lots of business travelers, the hotel chains figure the aggravation to some is less painful than giving up the revenue from others.

HotelChatter just put out its annual hotel Wi-fi report and it’s still uglier than one would expect at the high end chains. Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental, and Ritz-Carlton are still charging a fee universally. In some of the markets we cover, that would seem to put them at a clear disadvantage. While Four Seasons Mexico City and the Starwood chain St. Regis hit up every customer for Internet access, Las Alcobas , Habita, and Condesa df do not. The Ritz-Carlton Santiago makes you pay extra to check your e-mail. The Aubrey does not.

And if lovely Casitas del Colca in Peru can include Internet access in the rates, even though they rely on a satellite signal, surely those hooked into city cables can manage. It’s included in the rates at some of the best hotels in Latin America, like Banyan Tree Mayakoba in Mexico, Turtle Inn Belize, Faena Hotel + Universe in Argentina, and Cliffs Preserve in Chile. Even Royal Palm Hotel on the Galapagos Islands includes it in the rates.

As these examples show, the hotels in Latin America are way ahead of the pack in treating Internet access the way it should be treated—like hot water. It’s an essential part of our life now, for better or worse, so treating Wi-fi as some kind of special amenity is just ridiculous. Installing and maintaining a system is a cost of doing business, the same as supplying air conditioning or new flat-screen TVs. If Red Roof Inn and La Quinta can manage to make it work cost-wise, surely the Four Seasons can.

It’s time for them to free the signal and stop acting like it’s 1999. If you agree, look beyond the international chains and try an independent or domestic chain hotel. As the examples above show, they’re more likely to be run by service-oriented managers rather than hamstrung drones answering to bean counters a continent away.

I got interviewed last week for this article that just came out in Walletpop.com: Hotel fakeout photos can lure you and your money.

In Luxury Latin America, we only use hotel-supplied photos as a last resort, much to the chagrin of public relations people who want the same dreamy photos to be published everywhere that the hotel appears. It’s not that I don’t like pretty professional hotel photos, I just don’t trust them. Over and over again, what I see when I arrive at the hotel bears little relation to what I see on the staged and manipulated photos a hotel puts in its brochures and on its website.

The photo at the top is one of the perfectly nice guest rooms at Hacienda Tres Rios in the Riviera Maya. Go on their website though—or the website of just about any other resort in the region—and you’ll see sprawling rooms that look like they’re 1,500 square feet, thanks to the way the shots have been manipulated.

As the article notes, most of us are willing to put up with a bit of fantasy here and there. We know the models lounging by the pool are not the typical guests. We know it’s not sunny and beautiful every day. But the photographers can never seem to leave it at that. Here are typical deceptions you see most often:

1) Wide angle lenses and shooting from down low make guest rooms look far larger than they are.

2) Wide angle lenses, shooting angle, and clever cropping make swimming pools look much larger than they are.

3) Old, out-of-date photos are kept up for years, ignoring the construction next door, the eroded beach, or the peeling paint job you’ll see upon arrival.

4) Photos show an empty pool, when it reality it’s jam-packed every day and you’ll have trouble finding a lounge chair.

5) Room shots show a stunning view outside, when in fact 95% of the rooms don’t have a view anything like that.

Although top luxury hotels don’t need to be as deceptive as others, they often can’t resist the temptation either. So most of our hotel photos are shot by the writer actually doing the review. These shots may not pop off the screen as much as the staged ones, but they’ll show you what the reviewer saw, not what someone conjured up with Photoshop.

If you suspect the photos of a place you’re considering have been overly manipulated, do a Google Images search and a Flickr search with the hotel’s name. Often that will pull up dozens of photos from past guests and maybe a video or two. TripAdvisor reviews often have user photos and Oyster.com (also quoted in the article linked here) attacks the fake-out photos with glee.

Read the full article on WalletPop.com.

It looks like the U.S. home foreclosure wave is climbing into the upper ranks. A new story in the Wall Street Journal out today is titled, Foreclosures Hit Rich and Famous.

There’s nothing modest about these houses, with outstanding loads of $5 million or more.

-a Tudor mansion in Bel-Air belonging to film star Nicolas Cage

- a 14-acre Westchester mansion belonging to a former Merrill Lynch executive who headed up the Latin America division

- a Manhattan condominium owned by Italian film producer Vittorio Cecchi Gori, sold in a foreclosure auction for $33.2 million

The article says that in February alone, 352 homes nationwide in this $5 million+ category “…were scheduled for foreclosure auction, the final step before a bank acquisition.”

So what does this mean for Latin America? If you want my advice, tread carefully in the obvious bubble markets fueled by lots of speculative California money, places like Los Cabos, Puerto Vallarta, and the northern Pacific developments of Costa Rica. Or at least drive a hard bargain there to be sure you’re getting the true market rate. Plan to use your home a lot as the high-end rental market and near-term appreciation are both looking dicey for a while.

See our Latin America real estate stories for more.

I’ve been noting in our monthly newsletter for a while that this past year has been a terrific time to travel. Especially in terms of hotels, there have been some unprecedented bargains out there. The luxury hotels that have tried hard not to lower prices have been throwing in all kinds of freebies, from an extra night or resort credit to a complimentary spa treatment or golf game.

This can’t go on forever, of course, without the hotels getting into financial trouble. In the U.S. at least, the s&%t is already hitting the fan in a lot of places. Only in rare cases is the hotel shuttered, but guests are noticing other cutbacks: lower staff levels, inexperienced concierges, thinner towels, or fewer complimentary items at check-in or turndown. That’s the slant of this excellent article that ran Friday in USA Today: Hard times send hotel industry into survival mode. “In January, U.S. hotels had a record-low 45.1% occupancy rate”—the lowest since the tracking firm quoted started keeping records in 1987.

Things are especially bad in former bubble zones and in those resorts that depended on deep-pocketed corporate meeting clients. In California, 330 hotels have defaulted on mortgage payments and 76 are in foreclosure. The W San Diego was turned over to lenders in September after a loan default. The Ritz-Carlton at Lake Las Vegas will close on May 2.

Fortunately, Latin America is booming. Apart from Mexico and Honduras—which have seen drops based on something besides the recession—most of the region was either flat or up in 2009. Outside of economic boom areas like Chile, Brazil, and Peru, however, you may have better luck getting the staff levels and amenities you expect at luxury leisure hotels rather than business hotels: tourism has not declined as much as international business travel.

Have you noticed any deflation of expected amenities or staff levels at luxury hotels in your travels?

I’ve posted some info on here before about the ongoing soap opera that is the Yellowstone Club World Blixseth couple, a man and wife that have led a boom and bust life more dramatic than any reality TV script Bravo could throw together. The latest news from the Wall Street Journal has a Mexico twist: wife Edra Blixseth is putting their Los Cabos home up for sale at a list price of $12.88 million.

If you’re interested, it’s a two-acre oceanfront estate with 10,000 square feet of living space inside (six bedrooms) and another 7,000 feet outside.

She was awarded the house as part of the couple’s knock-down, drag-out divorce proceedings, but she has since declared personal bankruptcy. This Los Cabos home pales in comparison to their one near Palm Springs, CA. That listing has “excess” written all over it. The Journal described “a fountain with jets whose sprays rise about 80 feet and a private, 19-hole golf course of about 240 acres. The roughly 25,000-square-foot main residence is decorated with several ceiling murals and has a prayer room and separate wings for guests and children.”

My personal background on all this is that several years ago I was reviewing the property called Yellowstone Club World Tamarindo that was part of their vacation club, located in the Costalegre area a couple hours south of Puerto Vallarta. The lackey general manager pointed to the Blixseth yacht moored off the shore and told me how rich the owner was, that he was a billionaire who traveled the world and was pouring money into the resort to make it the best in Mexico. If you’ve seen the new Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland movie, picture this guy as one of the Red Queen court helpers with pasted on large ears. I could tell then that something was not quite right, but the resort looked great so I moved on.

Thankfully the resort and excellent golf course were quickly bought by someone else and both are still great, as simply El Tamarindo, but there’s no Blixseth yacht in the harbor anymore…