Unless you have a Platinum American Express Card that allows you access to the airline club lounges, you may want to start leaving that card at home.

American Express just announced it is raising its foreign transaction fee from a pick-pocketing 2 percent to a “hand over your wallet” 2.7%—a 35% increase that is pure profit. So if you charge $1,000, Amex takes 27 more of your dollars, even if you’re already paying them hundreds of dollars a year as a platinum card member that has been with them for decades. Many merchants just received a fee increase as well, which means the company is double-dipping to make up for its bad credit decisions over the past year. (It’s not just your tax money that is going toward a bailout.) Plus they skim a profit from the exchange rate as well, keeping a bit for themselves in every transaction. When a company can have three streams of income from a single purchase and still lose money, do the executives really deserve to earn millions in salary?

Right about now you’re probably thinking, “Yes, but doesn’t my Mastercard or Visa card charge a 3% transaction fee?”

Most of them do, with 1% going to Visa/MC and 2% to your issuer. But not Capital One. Standing by their “no hassle” commitment, Capital One won’t pick your pocket just because you charged something on the other side of a border or an ocean. They manage to make money with just two streams of income–the merchants and the exchange rate. A lot of credit unions won’t ream you either.

I’m still carrying my Amex Platinum when I travel to Peru in December, but I’ll only take it out to use the Delta lounge during a layover. The only one I’ll pull out to actually pay with abroad has Capital One stamped on it.

Here are a few more comments on the subject from Wendy Perrin and the FlyerTalk forum.

A story late last week in the Wall Street Journal noted that while air traffic is flat or sinking in nearly every region of the globe, it is up year-over-year in one region: Latin America.

In Airlines Plot Latin America Course, the Journal notes that American, Continental, and Delta were all launching new routes to the region. “International traffic in Latin America has climbed by 12.2% so far this year from a year earlier, dwarfing a global industry average of 3.3% world-wide.”

Travel is up, the Latin American economies are relatively stable overall, and so far anyway, more friends and relatives have been going back and forth.

It’s not all cheery news for travelers though. While the new routes will provide more options, we are apparently all paying more to get to those places.

“Passenger yields, or the price paid by passengers to fly one mile, on routes between the U.S. and Latin America climbed 23.2% in September from a year earlier — far exceeding growth across the Atlantic, Pacific or within the U.S., according to the Air Transport Association. Third-quarter revenue per available seat mile, an industry standard, rose 19.7% from a year earlier for American on its flights to Latin America. At Continental, the Latin America figure was 14.9%.

Also, some routes are being taken out of play when traffic drops. Delta recently cut service to Querétaro and León, the two airports serving the colonial heartland cities of San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato.

The article didn’t address what the Latin American airlines themselves are doing to take advantage of the rising tide. In my trips, they have offered a more pleasant flying experience than the U.S. carriers, and in the case of Taca and Copa anyway, usually at a better price as well.

I haven’t yet had the pleasure of flying on NatureAir, but after bumping over one too many lousy roads in Costa Rica, I believe I’ll be making use of their services quite a bit next time I visit.

NatureAir launched in 2000 and has grown to the point of flying 150,000 passengers annually. It has gone from one plane and 17 employees to eight planes and more than 150 employees. In essence, it’s a short-hop airline with 74 daily flights that will get you around Costa Rica or over the border to Panama. Planes can also be chartered for small groups or families. Fares are reasonable, they have a good reputation for avoiding delays (not easy during rainy season), and their safety record is excellent.

What really makes them unique though is the stance of being the world’s first carbon neutral airline. The company says, “NatureAir offsets more than 6,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually and uses carbon credits to help conserve Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, one of the region’s most biologically diverse rainforests.” I’ve said before that Costa Rica’s government and businesses do a better job than anyone in this hemisphere of doing and not just talking when it comes to preserving the environment. It’s nice to see the main domestic airline sticking to that commitment.

For more info see www.natureair.com or call 800-235-9272.

No, I’m not talking about Argentina’s brazen grab of private pensions. I’m talking about their decision to start slapping a reciprocal visa fee on visitors starting in January. It means that if your country charges the few Argentines that come to your country $134 for a visa, it will now cost the far higher number of your countrymen and women who go there just as much. Right in the midst of a global slowdown. Nice timing eh?

This hasn’t gotten much press yet since it doesn’t go in effect until January, but it’s lighting up the travel message boards. Word is also getting out on various blogs. You can read more on the Argentine Post blog or you can find some great insight from experienced guidebook writer and part-time Argentine resident Wayne Bernardson at the Southern Cone blog.

As he notes in another post, the dollar is now up bigtime in Chile and while that country also charges a reciprocity fee, they make up for it by eliminating the VAT for foreigners, effectively a 19% discount on hotels. In Argentina, by contrast, foreigners usually pay far more than the locals for hotels and domestic flights.

If you’re wealthy enough to be booking a tour that costs 30 or 40 grand you’re probably not going to bat an eye, but the message boards on FlyerTalk (not exactly a bastion of backpackers) is already filled with “I’ll go elsewhere” posts. You can just imagine what it will mean for those on a more limited budget, like a family of four deciding whether to go to Argentina and pay over $500 as a cover charge or go to Central America and pay zero.

And for some, it’s the principle of it that will make them avoid the country altogether. Yes, the government can spin this as an act of fairness, saying that since they have to pay that much so should we. All true in theory, but Argentina doesn’t have the security overhead or the big illegal immigration problem the U.S. and Canada do. Few visitors from Canada or the U.S. come to Argentina and stay on illegally to work. Then there’s the matter of how much tourism matters. The U.S. government seems to have taken an “if people come, they come, if they don’t, they don’t” attitude toward tourism and in the big scheme of things it probably hasn’t made much difference in the national economy. The domestic tourism industry is far bigger. If Argentina experiences a 30% drop in international tourism though—which is not unlikely in this climate—major crisis on top of crisis. It’s a far bigger chunk of their economy.

In a world where destinations are competing with each other for visitors, this move seems to go against any sense of logic. Each person traveling to Brazil, Chile, or Argentina will pay at least $100 for the pleasure of spending money in those countries. Meanwhile, those who visit Peru, Costa Rica, Panama, or Guatemala will pay nothing. Anyone who has to make a budget for their trip will take that into account. Reciprocity may be fair, but “fair” isn’t always “smart.”

Michael Steinberger runs Latin Tour Dimensions, a company that is known for its custom tours in Central America and South America, trips that are “complex, in-depth, and expensive.”  I interviewed him to find out what kinds of travel trends he is seeing. We talked about the changing face of tourism, what destinations are hot, and how a travel agent is like a doctor making a diagnosis. A short version of the interview is here, with the rest of it continued after the jump.

What kinds of trends are you seeing in Latin America? What has changed?
On the destination side, Argentina has been crazy–it’s off the map. Whereas every second request used to be Costa Rica, now every second request is Argentina. Plus people are staying longer and doing more. It used to just be Iguazu Falls, Buenos Aires, Bariloche, and then over to Chile. Now people are doing long custom tours of just Argentina and going to Mendoza for wine tours. They’re going beyond Bariloche to Calafate. In Chile, travelers are branching out beyond the well-worn path.

We are also getting a lot more upscale family tour requests now, with soft adventure activities and requests for a different kind of hotel style, one with a real sense of place. It’s a bonding experience.

There has also been a clear shift in what people want to experience when they travel. Before, people went to cities in Europe to see buildings, to Africa to see animals, to Asia to see monuments. But then the baby boomers really got hooked on experiential vacations. They decided they wanted to go to Tikal, Machu Picchu, and remote jungles, to see ancient civilizations. That’s what put Latin America on the map because we have it all. We saw that early on and embraced it. People who travel to Central and South America are well-versed travelers who are looking for more.

Give me some examples of some unusual requests you’ve been able to fulfill.
We do all kinds of adventure activities, but the toughest one to get together was a wine and gourmet tour across Chile and Argentina. We got the request from four couples in New York that had various wine and restaurant connections in their jobs. They knew their stuff and wanted a true gourmet experience. So we called in chefs to take them to market and cook for them, got them into the best restaurants, and had them meet with top winemakers. The challenge was that there wasn’t a structure already set up for this by anyone else. We had to find the right small local suppliers in each place to make it seamless, with the same high level of service throughout.

We also had one family from London that was very involved in polo and horses, so we needed to line up estancias around Argentina that would satisfy them, going beyond the surface level offerings to put them together with real horse people. We welcome challenges like these though. We really enjoy doing them because it shows we’re better equipped than the paint-by-number tour groups offering very similar programs.

See the rest of the interview with Latin Tour Dimension’s Michael Steinberger.