When you graph the stock market's recent lifespan, it's a pretty steep drop. A plunge like that is a little too stomach-churning for some people. But look at that downward slope another way. If it were on a mountain, it would be an exciting black diamond ski run.

Vermont knows how to make the most of a steep drop. In an effort to drag tourists away from their financial statements and back into its tourist industry, more than a dozen ski resorts and facilities in the state are teaming up to give away free skiing or snowboarding lessons over eight days.

Between January 4 and 11, members of the Vermont Ski Areas Association are setting aside time to teach novices the basics and, hopefully, convert some new devotees. To get a free lesson, all you have to do is book your slot online ahead of time (it's first-come, first-served, so no dawdling) and pick the resort where you'd like to learn.

Generally, participants can be as young as 6, but a few locations have minimum ages of 8 or 13. The only thing that's asked of you is that you're truly a beginner. (If you're just really, really bad at skiing, I'm sure they wouldn't mind that, either, because it's always hilarious to watch newbies snowplow down the bunny slope and tumble off their first chair lift dismount. Bring the kids and a camera.)

January, it turns out, is National Learn a Snowsport Month. (Pause to spit out your hot chocolate and laugh.) So Vermont's ski slopes aren't the only places where a new recruit can wax his skis for the first time. A group called the Snowsports Industries of America is mounting a day of lessons, too. This event, which will dole out free snowshoeing and cross country skiing tutorials, falls on January 10, and it's going on in 19 states. Go to the group's Winter Trails event website to book your slots for that giveaway.

Renting out a vacation home is a growing and largely unregulated industry. Pop the place up on Craiglist and a homeowner is in business. The National Association of Realtors reported that the number of second-home owners renting out their properties has increased from 18% in 2006 to 25% last year. And property management companies say that number has risen as the economy has slowed.

I understand why. My husband and I own a second home on Lake Erie and the cost of paying the non-homestead taxes and keeping it heated and cooled has soared in the last couple of years. Finding a tenant willing to pay big bucks (or even little bucks) to use it on the weekends we aren't is appealing.

But renting out a vacation home and keeping fun-seeking tenants pleased is no day at the beach. My husband still complains about the beds in the house we rented near Disney World three years ago so we could gather all 17 of us for a Mouse Ears Christmas.

The bed springs stuck through the tops of the ancient mattresses. You had to position yourself carefully, otherwise, when you rolled over, you'd get a puncture wound.

Then there was the lake-front place we rented near Michigan Speedway that smelled like rotten eggs and Valvoline.

And the house in Atlantic City whose owners boasted that it had a "breathtaking" view of the ocean. Well, you were certainly out of breath by the time you climbed three flights of outdoor stairs to the rooftop porch where if you leaned way over the railing, past the neighboring house, you could catch a glimpse of waves a quarter-mile away.

The magic is fading for Disney, but for its customers, it's just beginning.

This morning, after announcing that theme park bookings fell off a cliff in the last month and corporate income was down 13% last quarter, Disney's stock dropped 6.1%. Hotel bookings at the Walt Disney World resort are down 10% from what they were a year ago, profits are down from last quarter, and they're only going to get worse.

So Disney, which runs nine of the ten most-attended amusement parks in the world, has sprung into action and is doing something it never does: It's giving stuff away. After years of turning up its whiskered nose at discounting, suddenly it's scrambling to draw customers back to Orlando. Disney is going all-out to fill its parks again.

The biggest score was just announced. If you book by December 20, you can get a seven-day vacation for the price of four days. That means that if you buy four nights in one of its hotel rooms plus four days of park tickets at the full price, Disney will give you another three nights and three days theme park tickets--free. The buy-four-get-three-free deal, equivalent to a 34% discount, also comes with another astonishing gimme from January through March: a free $200 gift card, which can be used to buy food and souvenirs.

What? Disney is giving away money? What's next-- talking fairies?

Those of us who were leaning toward Delta Air Lines because of its policy of allowing a free first checked bag can now abandon any favoritism. As of December 5 (just in time for the holidays!), it will start charging $15 for the first check bag. That figure is pretty much what everyone's charging these days. Only upstarts like JetBlue and Southwest don't.

The news, though, brightens in a few quarters. Simultaneously, Delta has decided to halve its fee for a second bag from $50 to a more sensible $25. Not many of us check two bags, though, so the net effect will still be negative for most casual travelers.

The major American airlines, now that they've got you on the hook for your checked bags, are relenting on their fuel surcharges. Delta and Northwest are eliminating their fuel surcharges. It's about time, too, since it's gotten pretty hard to defend them. The price of oil peaked back in the summer but is now less than half what it was at its peak, and in the past month, it has fallen about $30 a barrel.

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.

In great news for cows but another blow for vacationers, the cruise vacation giant Royal Caribbean has elected to charge $14.95 to anyone who orders New York strip steak in the main dining room. Eat all you want, the line says. Just not that.

Much of the fun of taking a cruise has been that everything's included in your fare. You can swim, pig out on the buffet, dance, splurge on lobster, and get somewhere interesting all for the same price, which on the major lines pans out to be between $100 and $200 a day. Here we have a cruise line deciding that your $150 doesn't include steak. So much for feeling like you can indulge.

If serving steak is such trouble, you have to wonder why Royal Caribbean doesn't just raise the price up the cruise by $10 or so. (Or better yet, ease up on the mountains of uneaten food at the afternoon buffets.) Then everyone can have their steak and eat it, too. The cruise line collects money from people who would never order a cruise line steak, and customers will come away with the illusion of value rather than with the bitter taste of nickeling-and-diming in their mouths.

It started small last month, if you consider stranding 900 people on the wrong end of the planet "small." That's when the airline Zoom, which made regular transatlantic runs to North America, zonked out unexpectedly.

The sudden death of airlines creates a ripple effect. Last week, another 2,500 English travelers were left high and dry in the Mediterranean when Seguro, a vacation packager, raised the white flag. You see, the Spanish flyer Futura suddenly folded, leaving the vacation packager that used its flights holding the bag.

The next day, Britain's third-largest vacation seller, XL, gave up the ghost, halting its self-run flights and stranding an astounding 85,000 people abroad. That's a lot of sunburned Brits pounding the counters at tropical airports. Some 10,000 of them, who booked their flights without packages, were not covered by the bond and had to pay more money to get back home. Another 200,000 people with advance reservations were also wondering where their down payments had gone.

Many of the victims of these collapses thought they were covered because they used their credit cards to buy their trips. That's just not the case.