I've known for a while that debit cards and hotels don't really mix, but now I've learned it the hard way.

Last weekend, I stayed at an Embassy Suites in Florida, attending a magazine writers' conference. I had a wonderful, spacious room with all of the amenities, and the service was great, but like many hotels, Embassy Suites immediately put a "hold" on the money for the two nights I was staying. I had deposited a check that day at my bank, but because they were holding most of my funds until the next morning, I went through the late afternoon and evening, oblivious to the fact that I had almost nothing in my bank account -- and yet, plenty of unavailable money.

I discovered what had happened that evening at a restaurant when my debit card was declined. But that's another story entirely, although happily not one that ended with me washing dishes.

As thoughts of recession hang over the heads and wallets of everyone, the upcoming holiday season looks to be one of the slowest for the travel industry since 2001.

Hotels have more vacancies than they can afford, and those who are still planning trips are downsizing from their luxury accommodations to more modest rooms. That means that luxury getaways stand to lose a lot of money unless they can somehow lure travelers to fill their suites.

Most luxury hotels are cutting prices. For instance, Las Vegas' exclusive Bellagio hotel is offering its rooms at $149 per night this fall, including the Thanksgiving holidays -- this represents a 50% discount from regular rates. Many of the country's top-rated hotels have slashed prices anywhere from 15%-50% over last year's rates. While some holdouts still haven't cut room rates, they are offering more package deals, freebies, and inexpensive extras, or specials through third party websites.

Despite hard economic times, no one wants to give up a vacation. If you're traveling this fall, don't overlook the typically pricier places to stay -- you may find a good deal with killer extras for around the same price as last year's family vacation when you stayed at a Super 8. Shop around resort properties and ask what extras they're throwing in for folks who make reservations now. If you look in the right places, you should score some free meals, massages, and activities for your family.

This USA Today article has a nice list of luxury getaways with incredible deals for fall travelers. Happy trails!

Thomson, a vacation packager that serves some seven million customers a year in Britain, has admitted that it keeps a blacklist of customers who complain too much. If those grumblers try to book another vacation, they'll be unceremoniously denied. "They'll be told that we are unable to meet their expectations," a company rep told the U.K. Times.

"There's always been a philosophy that the customer is right," said the Thomson rep. "But these people will never be happy."

Some people don't stop at sending back soup when it's too cold or asking building maintenance to change light bulbs. There's the crew that trashes rooms and endangers others, and there's also a whole underworld of pikers who make a game out of picking fights in an apparent effort to pressure businesses into free upgrades or refunds. They dabble in outright fraud, ripping out wiring before marching to the lobby to complain about dangerous exposed wires. And as times get tougher and budgets stretch tighter, the something-for-nothing trickery is bound to get worse.

According to one service industry professional, the web has made it easier to target businesses with demands. Once a few complainers successfully extract refunds from a hotel, word gets out, and soon the career grifters swoop in for easy pickings. When a new hotel opens, for example, the white-gloved harpies get wind of it and arrive to find fault with minor issues such as faulty lighting and pool heaters that don't work properly yet.

It's not that I object to paying for web access while I'm traveling. Yes, I emphatically believe that it enhances a place's image to offer Web access for free, the way running water and heat are part of the package. Still, connectivity costs money to install and maintain, so I can deal with renting as long as the fee is reasonable.

What stinks is how it's dispensed. The billing increments are usually completely disconnected from the reality of how people actually use the web on the road. And that turns a sensible fee into something idiotic.

Hotels. Every place I check into offers the web these days. The smart ones, such as chains like Hyatt Place and Hampton Inn and nearly every privately owned hotel, offer it for free. They see it as an easy way to bait the hook. And I bite. I admit I am more likely to choose a hotel with free access than one that makes me pay. I know I'm not alone in this. But the ones that charge do so stupidly. Access comes in 24-hour increments there.

Now, think about this. You're going to check in at around 4 p.m. at the earliest. And you're going to leave at around 10 a.m. in the morning if you're lucky. That's about 18 hours. Business travelers will spend even less time than that in their rooms.

The airlines might have found a tax loophole, and you're it. The travel consultancy firm T2 recently published a worrisome blog post that is gaining traction. The airlines' extra fees, it says, aren't just costing consumers more. They're also enabling the airlines to dodge tax to our government.

Until a few months ago, checking a bag was considered a service that came with the base fare that you paid when you bought your plane ticket. That was taxed at a rate of 7.5%. But now many airlines are charging up to $50 for each bag each way, and because it's not part of the base fare, that fee isn't subject to tax. T2 says that cash belongs to the airlines, free and clear.

So a carrier like United, T2 writer Timothy O'Neil-Dunne calculates, would be cheating Uncle Sam out of tax income of $7.5 million for each $100 million it makes on extra fees. Given that United recently surmised that it stood to make $700 million on its extra fees, that's a lot of cash that won't be going to our schools, our roads, our veterans programs, and our elaborate Wall Street bailouts. Not only do consumers get screwed by these extra fees, they get screwed out of the greater good of tax revenue.

No one used to talk about this. But in the past year, several friends, all of them travelers I trust, have told me that when they stay at hotels, they always leave a few bucks on the nightstand for the hotel housekeeping staff.

News to you? This concept is growing. Call it Tipping Creep, which is the slow introduction of new optional surcharges in the world's service industries. But when to do it, where, and why are still open questions.

I asked one friend, who travels a lot for work, why she does it. "Because someone told me once that you should," is all she could think of. Not surprisingly, her rules are fuzzy: Leave money when she's staying for a few days, but not if she's only there for a night or two. Presumably, tipping in that way might encourage better service over time.

And there you have the two rationales for tipping: Because the staff needs it and because it buys better service.

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.

Does this picture look homey to you? Travelodge, one of Britain's primary hotel chains, has just opened a property in Uxbridge, in far west London, that's made almost entirely out of 86 shipping containers. Each room was pre-fabricated in China (where else?) with a built-in bathroom, shipped to England, and then stacked, as a BBC video story puts it, like "a giant Lego set."

The 120-room property, banged up in a scant 20 days, was then smoothed over to give it a unified look, much like your aunt might frost a layer cake. The trick works so well that the company is slapping up another one, this one more than twice as big, near London's Heathrow Airport, and about half of its future properties will be pressed from the same cookie-cutter mold.

I wouldn't say the place's industrial provenance is being sold as a gimmick or painted with the worn-out "green" brush. In fact, you'd never know you were sleeping in a former cargo hold, mostly because the hotel chain's rooms have never been very showy. Its battery-hen rooms are short on luxuries (plasma TV, yes; phone, no) and iffy on size (beds are king-size), but they're always defined by a dignified crispness. The pricing system is also simple: The more rooms that are available, they cheaper they are. If you book far enough in advance, rooms can be insanely affordable. For January, rooms can cost just £29 right now. That's about $50 a night.

We all do it. When we're planning a trip to an unfamiliar city or we're looking for a new hole-in-the-wall for a dinner date near home, we poke around online for reviews of local restaurants.

But on some sites, reviews are serving up a steaming plate of B.S.

WalletPop told you about the hugely popular Yelp, which has been accused of extorting restaurants and shops that got received bad reviews. For a price, says a San Francisco CBS affiliate, Yelp will move the badmouthing blurb lower down the page, potentially out of sight. One sofa store owner paid Yelp $350 a month to bury her embarrassing reviews.

Last year, one New York City hotel was awarded a five-star review by an effusive reader of TripAdvisor. Except the hotel hadn't even completed construction yet. Public relations flacks were suspected.

This sort of stuff happens all the time. TripAdvisor says it tries to weed out these obviously false postings. But some readers allege it swerves too far even in that. One travel expert about Hawaii accuses TripAdvisor of twice killing reviews that conflicted with its paid sponsors. For sites like these, integrity is everything. Many publications, though, don't have the resources to do the follow-ups necessary. Increasingly, the phonies are not apparent.

If your career or your travel lifestyle takes you into hotels regularly, then I'm sure more often than not you end up disappointed in your hotel room. I'm not lamenting your strike-out in the hotel bar, but more importantly the lack of reliable and affordable Internet connectivity at hotels.

In my experience I have noticed a correlation between the rack rate of the room and the quality and price of the Internet connection. The more your room costs the more Internet costs and often the more painful using it is.

Here are WalletPop's recommendations for the best hotels to get online at.

1. Residence Inn
2. Hampton Inn
3. Days Inn
4. La Quinta
5. Best Western
   

These hotel chains have provided free reliable high speed Internet connections at most, if not all of their locations which rate them high up on the list of chains to frequent.

Wanna get away? With all apologies to Southwest Airlines, it's not looking like the travel industry is going to get a boost from Bush's economic stimulus package: Only one in five of approximately 1,000 respondents to a recent USA Today/Gallup Poll said they were likely to use part or all of their rebates for vacation or travel, and 64% said they were not at all likely to do so.

That's not stopping hotels across the country from trying to tempt Americans to stimulate the economy by indulging their wanderlust. Until May 13, travelers who book a vacation package to cities like New Orleans, New York, Vegas and Nashville through Expedia's Explore America can save up to 30% on hotel stays. But you've gotta go between May 23 and Sept. 5.

If you're looking for lodgings by the beach, a slew of Virginia Beach hotels are offering their own economic stimulus packages. Among these are a "Romantic Weekend Getaway" at the Cavalier Hotel, where for $159-$319 per night through June 19, couples can get a room and indulge in complimentary champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries, then take a free one-hour bike ride to work it all off.

If your vacation is more of a family affair, get thee to the Clarion Resort Beach Quarters Resort for its "Virginia Beach Break-Away Package": two nights' stay, tickets to the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center, tickets to the Virginia Zoo and dinner at Pi-zzeria for $399 through June.

If you are among the lucky few who can take advantage of these deals, I enviously wish you bon voyage. I'll be thinking of you as I'm using my rebate to pay for past credit indiscretions and thumbing hungrily through old vacation photos from my boom years.

There are a lot of things I could be doing, sitting here this third morning of business travel in my $229/plus tax/night room at the Marriott Providence Downtown.

I could look out the window at my view of the Mobil Station with the majestic rise of the highway just beyond. I could be reading about "Weekend airport woes" in my complimentary copy of USA Today (and wondering how this particular newspaper has wrapped up the hotel market). I could, as I drink my Gourmet Bean coffee from its filter pack, splashed with two Mini Moo's of Half & Half, review my Express Checkout "Guest Folio."

If I was more energetic, I could compare and contrast my Hilton Garden Inn, Crowne Plaza Hotels and Resorts and Marriott Express Check-Outs printouts. If I pay attention, I will note that at the Hilton Garden Inn I had a "Zip-Out Check-Out."

For part 1 of Beth Wechsler's 'Rants from the Road' series, click here.

Call me spoiled. I like to take a shower in the morning. This is particularly appealing to me when (1) I need to wash my hair and, (2) I am going to be spending 7 hours attached to a microphone and standing at a podium. Like parking and drinkable water, I like to think that a morning shower comes included in the hotel's room rate - or rack rate, whatever that is.

Pardon me while I digress. What exactly is a "rack rate"? Is it the original, no discount room rate that a hypothetical person would pay if they didn't have any, and I do mean any, special discounts? Is the rack rate what you would pay if you didn't have a discount for being old (AARP), driving (AAA), being a member in any national association, including but not limited to the hotel's own programs - Choice Privileges, Priority Club, something that I think is called Starwood Preferred? I want to know what a "rack rate" is - whether the root of the word comes from the Latin, "racket" or from the Portuguese "to put on a rack." And I have another question - (one that relates to a childhood trauma when I attempted to use my NYC bus pass on the subway with grave consequences) - Can you get into trouble for trying to use your Choice Privileges rewards card at anywhere other than a Comfort, Quality, Sleep, Clarion or MainStay Inn?

Sheraton and Four Points by Sheraton recently added a new revenue stream: a $200 fine for smoking when all of the chains' hotels become smoke-free by the end of 2008.

According (subscription required) to the Wall Street Journal, Disney World will charge you as much as $500 if you light up in one of their hotel rooms, all of which are non-smoking. Swissotel Chicago pays its maids $10 for every smoker they catch.

Of course, plenty of smokers are complaining about the policy, but I think it's a good one: if you can afford to stay at Disney World and spend money on cigarettes, you can afford to pay a fine. Efforts to create inconveniences for smokers -- some hotels won't allow their guests to smoke within 15 feet of the entrance -- will encourage people to quit smoking.

And a hotel that charges $500 for smoking might be an excellent location for a "quit smoking" retreat -- Add in some spa treatments and hypnosis services, and chains like the Sheraton could probably market it as a "Stop Smoking 1-Week Getaway."