The dog rental business started off as one of those crazy Japanese trends that Americans couldn't quite believe really existed. In Japan everybody has mind-blowing electronics, wears eyelash wigs, competes on wacky gameshows like live Tetris. And, oh yeah, they rent out dogs for $19 an hour or $100 a day.

An American company FlexPetz has tried to copy the formula here, staring with a small office in Iowa. No, just kidding. Where would someone start the Zipcar of dogs but in Los Angeles and New York? They claim they are for people who don't have the time or pet-friendly apartment for a real dog but the more popular theory is they're for singles who want to pick someone up.

FlexPetz tracks their dogs with GPS and says they use rescue dogs "where possible." The dogs in their pictures all seem to be purebreds, but FlexPetz tells the stories of some that come from shelters or were given up by owners. By all accounts they take great care of their dogs. What these dogs' emotional life is like after work, I'm not sure.

What happens in Vegas may stay there, but these days, the problem is how to get there in the first place.

McCarran Airport, Vegas' major entry point, reported its biggest year-on-year drop since after 9/11. And Southwest Airlines, the rare profitable airline which recently said it wouldn't need to tighten its flight schedule, reversed course and said 13 flights, or about 5% of its Las Vegas seats, would be eliminated starting in January. Considering Southwest is one of the most reliable feeder of tourist traffic to the Strip, that's quite a blow.

To further put it in perspective, as of Sept. 2, Vegas had 81 flights from U.S. Airways daily. A year ago, it had 141.

The pain, though, is mostly for hoteliers and airlines. Tourists are starting to see a real benefit to the growing malaise. On Tuesday, Arthur Frommer wrote about seeing an ad for a two-night Planet Hollywood package for $149 per person that came with either $100 back or two free show tickets. When he called to book, he told the receptionist it was still too expensive. And just like that, he was offered the same deal for two people at $249 total. That's desperation.

Earlier this summer, casinos were low-balling tourists with archaic rates like $33 to $55 a room. Even now, prices on the Strip are sliding southward (the Sahara for $24, the Tropicana, $46, both quoted through a Hotels.com promotion) and rooms off the Strip are so low (like $20 at the Plaza Hotel off Fremont Street), they're virtually tragic.

Fast food restaurants and grocery stores test-market products all the time by slipping them onto the shelves. So often, in fact, that average consumers may not even notice when they've tried something impermanent. But hotel rooms are a different beast. Renovations are expensive, so they can't just remodel rooms and cross their fingers. And sometimes, ideas that looked good on the drawing board turn out to be hitchy in practice.

Most of the big brands conduct most of their experiments behind closed doors. According to an illuminating exposé from Portfolio.com, Starwood (Westin and W Hotels), Hyatt's Summerfield Suites, and Marriott all run mini-properties stashed in private locations such as warehouses and office basements. Loyal customers are quietly invited to give new rooms a whirl, although they're not usually allowed to stay overnight.

But Hilton operates a wing of an otherwise anonymous Los Angeles-area hotel specifically for the purpose of trying out new room ideas. Regular guests check in and out of the test rooms, conveniently located near Hilton's corporate offices. To ensure that only brand devotees are exposed to potentially disastrous experiments, its El Segundo Hilton Garden Inn property (which is the only one of the 260 HGI properties that Hilton directly owns and operates) assigns the prototype rooms only to people with Diamond frequent-stay status. That translates to folks who stay in Hiltons for about two months a year.

Just because you have checked out of your hotel doesn't mean that you've finished paying for your stay.

CNN reports that many hotels are adding on charges after guests have checked out, for anything from breakfasts to minibar and snack items. An industry source confirmed that 75% of these charges are related to the minibar, which is chock-full of routine, but tempting, items...all priced twice to three times what they'd cost at the gas station on the corner.

Unfortunately, if the anecdotes around the web are to be believed, more than a few travelers are being hit with charges for items they didn't even use, in part due to the use of high tech sensors that can bill you as soon as you grab a pack of peanuts. Even if you were just seeing how many calories they had!

While many people will see this as another corporate entity trying to steal from the consumer on a massive scale, it seems that abuse of late billing is the work of a few bad apples or a breakdown in command. The article points out that the number of late billings has doubled in the past year, which sounds extraordinary, but if you do the math, it has only changed from one in 200, to one in 100 bills being changed after checkout. This makes sense to me, since the number if things for which you can be charged appears to have quadrupled in the last year.

Whenever I travel I do my best to avoid any chance for late billing by bringing along a small snack or stopping at a convenience store on my way to the hotel. Not only do I pay less, I have a better selection. I also opt to skip the express checkout. That way I can easily dispute a charge while the stay is fresh in my mind...and where I can make a scene in the lobby if they try to charge me for a Snickers bar and Pay Per View I didn't order. Even with all of these precautions, it is still a good idea to check for any odd charges after any hotel stay.

I've always been a believer that if "you broke it, you bought it." If you cause someone to lose money, you should pay them. If you've incurred a bill, the business has a right to collect the money. But this kind of stuff can be taken a little too far. And The Westin Casuarina Hotel & Spa in Las Vegas has done exactly that.

Here's how the story goes. A bunch of people attended a four-day dental conference at the hotel in October. The conference was organized by the Coaching Center of Austin, a consulting group that reportedly ended up not paying about $50,000 owed to the hotel. But The Westin apparently found a handy solution. They'd just collect the money from those who attended the conference.

What? You heard it right. The hotel started charging the credit cards of attendees over $600 each, calling it a "pro-rated amount per attendee," according to the story. Their reasoning? The hotel's fine print says that guests can later have their credit cards charged for unpaid charges. Yet, guests say that they thought it meant their personal unpaid charges related to their rooms, not unpaid charges by the conference organizer.

And I'm pretty sure that's what we all believe when we sign up for a hotel room. That we'll be liable for our own personal unpaid charges, not those of a broke consultant who isn't paying their conference charges. What a crock!

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

The premise is simple: A hotel does not have any smoking rooms because of the stench and the filth smoking creates. You stay at the hotel, you're expected to abide by the no-smoking rule. If you smoke, you pay a fee, often in the $200 to $250 range (but at some chains as much as $500!). Sounds fair to me.

The truth is that cleaning a room following a smoker can be expensive because often anything cloth (curtains, couches, etc) needs to be cleaned. After all, what non-smoker wants to stay in a non-smoking room that has just been smoked in? Yuck.

But even non-smokers have to be careful. Last year I was put into a room in one of these strict non-smoking hotels, and the room reeked of stale smoke. I didn't stay in it, because I didn't want to pay the penalty the following day when the cleaning staff smelled the odor. Plus I didn't want to smell the stale smoke all night and then smell like it all next day when the smell invaded my clothing. So I went straight to the front desk and asked for a different room. They were happy to help.

More chains are moving toward having all rooms non-smoking, including Sheraton, Marriott, Westin, and Walt Disney. They say it's just too expensive to allow smoking in the rooms, and I don't blame them. If you get one of these charges and you haven't smoked in the room, you can often dispute it. But for those who really are smoking, hotel staff is on the lookout for evidence, so don't think that you'll have an easy time getting out of the smoking fee.

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.