Here’s an interesting article on cruises to Antarctica called “Bragging Rights.” The author, Marie Javins, went on a (relatively) bargain-priced cruise to the icy continent from Ushuaia, Argentina, and notes that most of the time was spent in transit. Upon arriving at disembarkation points, she was sharing her “pristine view” with 100 other tourists at a time.

As the recent sinking of an Antarctica cruise ship illustrates, these are inhospitable waters that are not really so conducive to tourism anyway. Do we really need over 37,000 people a year heading down there just so they can say they’ve been? I’ve never understood the appeal of bragging about how many countries you’ve been to anyway (especially since that seems to be a favorite pastime of cruisers who make lots of one-day port stops).

If you must to to Antarctica, please do it right. Treat it as a major event and spend accordingly to go with one of the very best operators. Groups should be small, the ship should be top-notch, and the tour company should voluntarily follow the guidelines of the IAATO. This is a fragile area: let’s not let it turn out like the Galapagos!

This could be the beginning of the end for the formerly uncrowded Honduran island of Roatan. As the Wall Street Journal reported in The Next Place in the Sun, the island could soon turn into just another tacky Caribbean cruise port.

Royal Caribbean just inked a deal to build a $30 million extension to the island’s cruise terminal, while Carnival is spending $50 million on its own port of call, which it says can handle as many as 7,000 passengers daily when it opens in 2009.

This scares some residents, but others are cackling with joy at the thought of getting some bucks off these short-stay stopovers, despite all the damage to the reefs and the island’s character. To me it’s just depressing to see yet another island with a lot going for it succumbing to the pressure to open up to mammoth ships. Mass tourism wins again.

Apparently this is all driven by the average Joe and Jane tiring of ports like Cozumel, which is “packed with 15 ships on busy days.” John Tercek, vice president of commercial development for Royal Caribbean is quoted in the article saying, “People like to brag at a cocktail party, I’ve been to some place you haven’t.” As if stopping in a cruise ship port for a few hours is “being somewhere.” Good god.

As for me, I’m going to try to make it down there in ‘08, while I can tour the island and kick back on the beach without seeing a massive floating hotel right by the shore. I may be adding a new hotel or two to our current listing, Anthony’s Key Resort (pictured here).

“Fractional vacation home” companies bristle at the word “timeshare” since it has connotations of tawdry developments and fast-talking sharks trying to bamboozle you into something you don’t really want. But at the risk of alienating future advertisers, the luxury version of this game is not any more secure when it comes to the financials. The numbers are just bigger. This became very clear with the recent belly-up move of a company marketed by esteemed names Abercrombie and Kent and Andrew Harper’s Hideaway Report. Get the sordid details from this USA Today story: Members of a bankrupt vacation club strike back.

As anyone who runs these things should know, when you stiff a bunch of rich people, an army of lawyers will follow. And stiff them they did.

“The clubs, which enabled members to stay in a network of multimillion-dollar vacation homes in glamorous destinations, cost $100,000 to $1.3 million to join, plus annual dues and daily usage fees. Abercrombie & Kent and Harper ended their association with the clubs, which they did not operate, two years ago. Re-branded as Tanner & Haley destination clubs, they went bankrupt in 2006.”

In other words, people put up the price of a nice little beach house for a fractional share in a bigger and nicer one and were left with…nada.

Here’s a bit of advice. Buying a real house or condo that you own outright is real: real property, real title, real ownership, and you at the helm. If you must buy into a fractional plan to get rid of ownership hassles and leverage into a bigger place, due even more due diligence than you would for an outright purchase, not less. The risks are higher, the ability to even break even on a future sale is iffy, and the unknowns are greater. You can find plenty of people who have done this and are thrilled. Be one of them instead of the ones having weekly meetings with a class action attorney.

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 have a generally positive review of Le Blanc Spa Resort in our growing Mexico section of Luxury Latin America, but there’s no way to anticipate whether a place is going to blow it sometime along the way though and it looks like Le Blanc is blowing it bigtime on some weeks. Here’s the full story on HotelChatter: Le Blanc Cancun Under Fire Over Kosher Weekend.

Apparently more than a few guests have gotten ticked off by the hotel’s decision to turn the place kosher for a week each year to accommodate a specific big-spending group. This has meant getting rid of all the alcohol and making the normally sleek adults-only resort kid-friendly as well. Tolerable maybe if you know all this in advance and don’t mind kids and no cocktails, but infuriating if you don’t, especially since some who had reservations had to leave and stay elsewhere.

This isn’t the only place something like this has happened, but it’s not a good sign. Any hotel willing to take a short-term payoff that will alienate independent travelers doesn’t get the whole concept of long-term superior service. When word spreads this quickly among current and future guests, it can bring down a place’s reputation in no time.

Word to the wise though: always ask if any large groups or special events are going on at any hotel you don’t know well before you book the rooms—preferably by e-mail so you have it in writing.