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…

As I mentioned in an earlier post specific to Latin America, I attended the Luxury Travel Expo last week and got to hear what people in the industry had to say about the state of upscale travel in late 2009.

They were more upbeat than I expected, especially since travel to Europe has fallen off a cliff and the convention/incentive market is having a terrible year. And of course there are too many new hotels and too many new cruise ships for any of them to be much more than half full without major discounting. (Tough for them, good for you. There are some amazing deals on sites like LuxuryLink.com.)

Besides the obvious search for value though, lots of other interesting luxury travel trends came out that I thought were newsworthy.

1) More family travel
It used to be that “luxury” and “family travel” didn’t mix much, but that has changed in a big way. People are having kids later, they’re having fewer of them, and the grandparents often have more money than the parents do. I started noticing this shift a couple years ago when I’d go to a Four Seasons and find the pool packed with kids, but this has extended to safaris, soft adventure trips, and nature excursions. African safari operator Micato said in a panel discussion that their family travel bookings had gone from 10% to 35% in eight years. This bodes well for villa rental places and small-ship cruises, but not so well for cookie-cutter hotels that think connecting rooms are going to be enough to serve this demand.

2) Deeper travel experiences
It used to be that bragging about shopping in Paris or Milan was what you did to impress the neighbors. Now it’s more likely to be that you visited some place they’ve never even heard of or you did something worth talking about on your vacation. Adventure travel is way up, volunteer travel is way up, and travel to former pariah destinations is way up—to places like Colombia, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. Luxury travelers are becoming more like backpackers—wanting to mingle with real people and get authentic experiences instead of just being sheltered away in an artificial world.

3) Rising influence of green hotels and travel
Have you been paying more attention to the environmental practices of the hotels where you stay? If so you’re not alone. Tour operators are finding that guests are becoming steadily more demanding about how “green” the hotels are where they stay and are no longer looking at “luxury” and “eco-friendly” as being different things. Since Costa Rica is considered the birthplace of eco-tourism and a large portion of trips to Latin America are by nature lovers, parts of the Americas are perceived as being in better shape than many other parts of the world in this regard.

What has changed in what you are looking for when you travel now? What are you willing to pay more for…and not?

If someone has to drop the asking price of their house from $85 million to $72 million, should we feel sorry for them? That’s what has happened to poor Mohamed Hadid, who is best known for building Ritz-Carlton hotels in the 1980s. If you’re in the market for a 48,000-square-foot mansion, here’s the listing.

While much of the press attention regarding the U.S. property bubble has been about subprime loads and foreclosures in the rust belt, the most breathtaking declines have been in California and Florida—the two states that got the most inflated to start with. Many buyers who got in on their ideal gated community around a golf course are finding that it’s not so lovely when the developer goes bankrupt and the weeds start growing in the bunkers.

So what does this have to do with Latin America? Well for one thing, I’d argue as always that you have to know when things are getting frothy and when there’s still plenty of appreciation left. Parts of Costa Rica and the Los Cabos area of Mexico were looking like nosebleed territory three years ago. Now that the flipping up north has stopped, there are fewer buyers willing to pay California prices for a strip of sand or a penthouse. In most of the rest of Latin America, however, there’s not much downside.

But (and there’s always a but), some developers will always get into trouble by overextending. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Marriott is halting all development of its luxury building projects for owners. “The pullback affects all three formats that Marriott sells under its Marriott and Ritz-Carlton brands…Marriott is permanently exiting development of luxury-residential projects…” The article says that the company basically made no money whatsoever on its own projects after subtracting write-downs.

Sometimes bigger isn’t better.

The long-awaited Capella Pedregal resort is now open in the most hopping part of the lower Baja Peninsula: Cabo San Lucas. You’ve probably read about it in magazines, with articles a desk editor put together from a press release, but we don’t work like that. We wait until the resort is actually open for business and we can give the rooms and service a good once-over.

There are few writers as qualified to do that as our new correspondent Marbeth Mellin. She’s the go-to person for all things Mexico at Concierge.com and has written more articles on the country than she can probably count. So trust her when she says, ”Away from the lineup of luxury hotels in Cabo’s Corridor, this stylish hideaway is the undisputed star in Cabo San Lucas.”

Read the full review to get a detailed account of this brash new resort on the Cabo scene: Capella Pedregal Cabo San Lucas

We were honored to be among the first batch of guests at Banyan Tree’s first hotel in the Americas. The president of Mexico had just been a guest at the opening ceremony two weeks before we arrived, kicking off what is (for now) the most impressive resort in a region full of impressive resorts. Where do we go from here?

Who knows, but for now check out the Luxury Latin America review of Banyan Tree Mayakoba in Mexico.