We’ve had our eye on Pelican Eyes in Nicaragua for a while, but felt like some improvements needed to come into play to make this a true upscale travel lodging option. Also known as Piedras y Olas (Rocks and Waves), this is a San Juan del Sur institution that started out modestly and grew along with the destination.

With an expanding number of villas in the mix as nightly room choices, Pelican Eyes now offers reason enough to stay in San Juan del Sur rather than venturing on to Morgan’s Rock. There are still some obvious rough spots, especially when it comes to service and shuttles, but there are enough other positives to make up for it.

All of the two-floor, two-bedroom casas (houses) and smaller casitas (townhouses) are constructed with the same smooth, whitewashed style as the original hotel. They are airy and expansive, luxuriously outfitted with hand-carved furnishings, locally sewn linens, salto ceramic tiles, skylights, and delightful bedrooms overarched with adobe brick ceilings reminiscent of a Spanish wine cellar. All the units open onto marvelous private patios and porches; the casas have two.

Full gourmet kitchens, with hand-painted tiles, professional cookware, and an assortment of appliances (mixers, blenders, and more) are complimented with tasteful dining areas. Enormous, modern marble and glazed-cement bathrooms have rainforest showerheads and thoughtful amenities.

With two restaurants with a view, pools, and a great panorama of the bay throughout, this is the best place in town to kick back and take it all in.

See our detailed review of Pelican Eyes in San Juan del Sur.

See more luxury hotels in Nicaragua.

After giving it a rest for a little while, we’ve got two new resort reviews going up for Nicaragua. The first is so close to Granada “you can hear the cathedral bells,” says our correspondent Paige Penland.

El Jicaro Island Resort is no city hotel though, that’s for sure. It’s a very ec0-friendly but upscale lodge built on an island in Lake Nicaragua, reached by boat from Granada. Here’s what’s in store after you get there.

There are only nine marvelous, two-story villas on the rugged little isleta, imaginatively designed to blend seamlessly into this mountainscape in miniature. Flagstone trails wend through the rocky forest floor between them, where a fragile ecosystem was carefully conserved during construction and delicately landscaped afterward, using permaculture principles. These exuberant gardens, into which the resort was so perfectly inlaid, interweave native flowers and trees into an optimum environment for all.

In some ways this resort surpasses the best hotels in the nearby city and you can’t beat the location if you’re looking for calming views and solitude. Come here to truly unwind and spend quality time with your romantic partner before diving back into what the city has to offer.

See our full review of El Jicaro Island Ec0-Resort.

See more of the best hotels in Nicaragua.

The popularity of different sections of Luxury Latin America will ebb and flow with the seasons and with which destinations are getting media coverage—good and bad. When we started, Mexico had no trouble ruling the roost, but it has declined a bit in the past year with all the negative cable news attention on the border zone problems. Argentina was riding high for a while, but has ebbed since the hefty new entry fee was introduced earlier this year and the political situation has become more bizarre. Specific hotels spike for a month when they get featured in a glossy magazine, then drop again when the new flavor comes along next issue.

Here are the most popular sections and articles for the past 30 days, then specific hotels getting the most hits.

Most popular pages on Luxury Latin America:

Luxury hotels in Belize
Luxury hotels in Panama
Luxury Tour Reviews
Real estate in Cuenca, Ecuador
Luxury hotels in Argentina
Cruising the Galapagos Islands
Luxury hotels in Los Cabos
Real estate in Boquete, Panama
Arriving at Machu Picchu in Style
Luxury hotels in Costa Rica

Most popular hotels and resorts on Luxury Latin America:

Hotel Garzon – Uruguay
Azul Resort – Belize
Cayo Espanto – Belize
Banyan Tree Mayakoba – Mexico
Bristol Buenaventura – Panama
Turtle Inn – Belize
Capella Pedregal Los Cabos – Mexico
Cavas Wine Lodge – Argentina
Barefoot Cay – Honduras
Morgan’s Rock – Nicaragua

There are a lot of elements that go into the price of a flight, from staff costs to government fees to landing gate charges at airports. One big variable—and the ones most airlines use to justify all kinds of add-ons and extras—is the price of fuel. Well how much does it really cost to carry each passenger a thousand miles through the air?

Spirit Air is doing its best to figure that out and share it with its customers. It has published a handy dandy chart showing how much it costs them in fuel to go a certain range of distance. You can see the full breakdown at this link, but here are a few examples:

• A short hop of 400 to 599 miles costs them $21.67 at current fuel rates
• Going 800 to 999 miles is a shade over $30
• Their longest hauls of 2000+ miles costs $78 per passenger in fuel

So to put that in real terms, for Ft. Lauderdale to Cancun, fuel is only around $22. Flying all the way to Lima from there, fuel is more than $78 per passenger. All these rates assume an 80% load factor, so if the flight is jammed full the actual cost per person would be a bit less. I’m not sure how cargo is figured in. And what if my seatmate weighs twice as much as I do? Should those who can’t fit in a regular airline seat multiply by two?

Think about this next time you see a $300 “fuel surcharge” on your legacy airline flight to Europe. Where’s that money really going? Why isn’t it just included in the price of the ticket?

When you see these fuel prices though, it makes Spirit’s cheap fares look even better, especially if you’re part of that $9 fare club. If you can snag one of those rates, you are flying for less than the cost of the fuel, never mind all the other costs the airline bears. So smile when you pay that checked baggage fee or a swipe your credit card for a cup of coffee in the air. Chances are those fees might not even get you back to even.

If you just want to get from point A to point B and have plenty of cash left over for spending after arrival, Spirit Air serves many Latin American destinations besides Cancun and Lima. They’ll get you to Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama, and four locations in Colombia.

More on airlines serving Latin America. Thanks to SmarterTravel for the original post on this.

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?