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.

Banyan Tree Mayakoba

When luxury hotels do battle trying to one-up each other, the guests reap the benefits. Some amenities come and go—remember when suites had to have a fax machine? Others become so popular that they get folded into the requirements for AAA 5-diamond awards, like having three phones in the room or a shower stall separate from the bathtub.

According to this story in the Wall Street Journal, the real competition is taking place in the bathrooms. One new development has already popped up in the new St. Regis in Mexico City: a TV embedded in the bathroom mirror. It sounds kind of silly now, but maybe later we’ll be going, “Remember when you couldn’t watch the news while you shaved?”

The article says the Four Seasons group is making these embedded TVs and digital clocks standard in all new renovations and new hotels. You can expect a hotel owned by Kohler to set the tone on this, so they’re not holding back.

The American Club, a resort hotel in Kohler, Wis., owned and operated by kitchen and bathroom furnishings maker Kohler Co., is scheduled to complete the first phase of room renovations May 1. The renovations include revamped showers with multiple showerheads, including an overhead “rain” shower, two body sprays attached to the wall and a hand spray. Some higher-priced rooms include a “flipside handshower” that changes the spray pattern with a flip of the shower head, and one room features a large soaking tub for two people with a tiny-bubble massaging feature and chromatherapy.

You can see my favorite bathroom in this video tour of Casitas del Colca in Peru. Heated floors, big tub, indoor shower and outdoor shower. It barely edges out my second favorite one: the Banyan Tree Mayakoba, pictured at the top.

What gets you jazzed up in new hotel bathroom developments? What aspect is the most important to have?

The St. Regis in Mexico City officially opened late last year, but it took us a while to act on that because we were caught by surprise. After all, the Ritz-Carlton there that was announced in 2007 never materialized (we hear it’s going to be an office building now) and Las Alcobas took a year after the lobby furniture arrived to start welcoming guests.

The St. Regis is for real though, as witnessed by the newest correspondent to grace our pages, Jim Johnston. He’s the author of Mexico City: an Opinionated Guide for the Curious Traveler. He’s also an artist, which made him a good choice to check out this sleek and suave hotel. The photos may remind you a bit of the interiors at Las Alcobas and no wonder—the two newest luxe hotels in the D.F. share the same design firm, Yabu Pushelberg.

“The interiors…are an eclectic mix of styles that recall everything from lacy Arabic scrollwork, to 1950’s Miami beach retro, to intricate Florentine tapestry designs. Floor to ceiling glass walls take full advantage of the urban landscape outside. It’s elegant but casual, serious but fun.”

The amenities are certainly serious though, giving the Four Seasons Mexico some serious competition. There are high-tech ones, like a TV in the bathroom mirror, and high-touch ones, like a butler on each floor.

It’s safe to say that road warriors who want to stay here to rack up some Starwood frequent guest points certainly won’t be making any sacrifices as a result. This big chain business hotel rivals the top competitors in town mentioned above and is a clear cut above the next tier of chain hotels led by the J.W. Marriott.

See our full review of St. Regis Mexico City.

Each year there’s a lot of anticipation about which hotels in North America will join AAA’s prestigious 5-Diamond list. This is a tough club to join as the physical requirements to meet are daunting and there are a lot of expenses involved, such as having a high staff-to-guest ratio and people who can speak multiple languages.

Three new hotels made the list in Mexico: the St. Regis Punta Mita Resort in Nayarit and two hotels that are walking distance apart on the other coast: Mandarin Oriental Riviera Maya, and Rosewood Mayakoba. Naturally, we have reviewed all three of them already. Follow the links for detailed info.

Who got dropped, you ask? None of them in Mexico actually. The six that lost their ranking are in the U.S.

There’s a lot going on outside of what we cover in detail here, so today we’ll take a step back and look at the travel and real estate news for Latin America.

- Argentina seems to have backpedaled on its unpopular decision to start soaking North American and British visitors an extra $130 or more for the pleasure of spending their money in the cash-strapped country. For the moment anyway, no announcements or collections have taken place. It looks like they have figured out that travel will nosedive when word gets out, especially for families.

- Costa Rica has added a new property tax on houses and condominiums valued at more than $180,800 according to International Living. It’s either a Robin Hood play or a contribution to a good cause depending on how you look at it, with the money going to build affordable housing for locals currently living in shantytowns. Either way, it’s probably not going to impact whether you buy there or not: at a rate of .25% up to $1.36 million, the tax on a $500,000 condo would be $1,250 per year. Still that is far higher than any other country in the region and Costa Rica already has some of the most expensive coastal real estate between Los Cabos and the bottom of South America.

- The always buzz-worthy Francis Ford Coppola has opened another lodging property, this time in Argentina. We won’t be reviewing it since it’s more a rental villa than a hotel, but Jardin Escondido is in the artsy Palermo Soho neighborhood of Buenos Aires. It’s a three-level townhouse that can sleep 13, with a large pool courtyard.

- Conde Nast Traveler just put out its 2009 Hot List for hotels. The Latin American coverage is pretty skimpy, but that’s okay. We’ll continue to bring you detailed reviews of consistently great hotels rather than the trendy flavors of the moment. They did touch on a few we’ve reviewed already though in Luxury Latin America, including Casitas del Colca (Peru), Inkaterra La Casona (Peru), and St. Regis Punta Mita (Mexico).