Are you one of TravelPost.com’s top hotel reviewers of 2006? Of the last seven days? Of all time? Once TravelPosters could only dream of achieving these esteemed ranks. But with the addition of our new Top Hotel Reviewers page, you can shoot for the hotel reviewing stars and compare your climb to the top with other avid travelers like you.

Here are the current winners:

December 2006: cstvhog

Last Year (2006): duderdude

Last 7 Days: travelpoet

This Year (2007): travelpoet

Top Reviewer of All Time: duderdude

Congrats to our lovely winners. Your challenge? Knock those top dawgs from their spots by writing your own hotel review.

Happy New Year! While recovering from the Auld Lang Syne events of last night, I’ve been thinking about travel resolutions for the coming year. These aren’t lofty I promise to visit Mongolia or Greenland or (insert faraway place here) resolutions. These are more of the practical sort of resolutions, because that’s our focus over here at the TravelPost.com Insider. Without further ado, here are the TravelPost.com Insider’s 2007 Travel Resolutions:

1. Organize frequent flyer miles and loyalty points. Now that I’ve been collecting miles and points at an aggressive pace over the last year or two, it’s time to get a grip on account balances. I’ll start with Points.com and report back on my experience.

2. Take more photographs. I always return from trips thinking, now why didn’t I take more photographs? Really, it’s a matter of habit more than anything else. So I’m going to turn over a new photographic leaf this year. As of Dec. 25, 2006, I became the proud new owner of Canon’s Powershot SD40 in hot pink. This 7.1 megapixel digital camera has an 1.8 inch LCD monitor and is about the size of your average cell phone. Just the thing to kickstart this resolution.

3.Look for Y-Up or Q-Up fares when booking airline tickets. I never pay attention to the fare codes when I buy plane tickets. I am usually in too much of a hurry to care. But tickets with these codes can land you in first class seats for the same price as a full fare coach ticket. For a quick tutorial on snagging these special fares, start with FareCompare’s How to Book YUp QUp.

4.Keep baggage claim stickers until the bitter end. With airlines still struggling to handle the increase in checked baggage spurred by the liquid ban, lost luggage incidents are more common than ever. Keeping those stickers until your bags are in your hot little hands at baggage claim is your best bet for getting lost luggage returned quickly and safely.

5. Figure out what that air puffer machine is doing to me when I walk through it. As much as I enjoy an unexpected, seemingly pointless blast of air in my face every now and again, going through that thing makes me feel like I’m a hapless extras in an episode of the X-Files just before Scully and Molder figure out that aliens are really controlling the universe. And stealing our brains. Or something.

Check back with me at the end of ‘07 to see how these rezzies pan out.

Happy New Year to you and yours from the TravelPost.com Insider!

Merry Christmas from all of us at TravelPost.com. We hope the winter season brings good luck, joy and many happy travels to you and your friends and families. We’ll be back tomorrow with more travel news, tips and advice from around the web. Now stop reading and go guzzle that eggnog!

While we certainly hope all your future hotel stays are lovely and without incident, we know that travelers meet with lodging disappointments all the time. Should you find yourself feeling the same way this TravelPoster did about accommodations on recent visit to Lake Buena Vista, FL, may I make a humble suggestion? Upload some photos. When photos accompany a hotel review, it is much easier for travelers to visualize the hotel the way you experienced it - whether it was the hotel of your dreams or an overnight sojurn in Crappile, USA.

You can upload photos of a hotel directly from the hotel’s dedicated TravelPost.com page or by writing a hotel review.

As wiseman Pee Wee Herman once sang with unwarranted gusto, bird is the word. All of us at TravelPost.com hope you and yours have a fabulous Thanksgiving holiday filled with turkey (or for the veggies, tofurkey) and other good things like family, friends and that random uncle’s slightly shady, but still quite humorous jokes (we all have one…). If you’re traveling, may you reach your destination quickly and without ridiculous delays. Things will be quiet at the TravelPost.com Insider today as this blogger stuffs herself silly, but be sure to tune back in tomorrow for more travel tips, advice and news from around the web.

Hot on the heels of our recent International Airport Wi-Fi Guide and our earlier U.S. Airport Wi-Fi Guide, we just launched a brand spankin’ new resource that we hope you’ll bookmark and enjoy:

TravelPost.com’s Hotel Internet Access Guide

Since we couldn’t possibly put together a chart listing Internet amenities for all the thousands and thousands of hotels across the country, we chose to focus on brands instead. You’ll find information about 44 major hotel brands and their company-wide high-speed Internet access policies. You’ll learn useful geek information like the fact that every Red Roof Inn in the USA is also a T-Mobile hotspot, and that Westin offers free local and long distance calls with the flat rate its hotels charge for daily high-speed Internet access (so save those cellie minutes).

As with every resource we put together for travelers, we encourage you to email us if you find errors or have any updates you’d like to tell us about.

It’s a big day for the folks at TravelPost.com. As you may have already heard via the press release grapevine, TravelPost.com has been acquired by SideStep, the very best travel search company in the entire world.

What does this mean for loyal TravelPosters the world over? Well, it’s business as usual at the TravelPost.com Insider, and your travel blogs, hotel reviews and Insider photographs will remain just as they are. Down the line, you can expect to see new, ultra-cool site enhancements and tools to make your traveling life easier.

Keep checking the TravelPost.com Insider for news about new site features and company developments.

For now, we’re positively amped to be a part of SideStep and look forward to great things to come from our new parent company.

SideStep, Inc. Acquires TravelPost.com

Time for a shamelessly self-promotional post. Isn’t it cool that you can find travelers’ photographs alongside TravelPost.com hotel reviews? Hey, they may not be Ansel Adams quality (or even close), but they do offer up hotel information you’d never know about otherwise. For example, this hefty construction project is in full swing across the street from one Washington, DC, hotel. Not a big deal for early risers and hard sleepers, but nearby construction can be a huge irritation for some travelers. Ah, the sound of jackhammers in the morning, right?

You can upload your own photos from any hotel page. Thanks to one camera-happy TravelPoster for sending this one in…

Dunno about you, but I always like to know how big a hotel’s fitness room is before I arrive. That way I know if I need to pack running gear - I get depressed working out in pint-sized, dark and otherwise cramped fitness rooms. One TravelPoster was kind enough to post this photo of the fitness room at Marriott’s Waikiki Beach Resort & Spa. While it doesn’t hold a candle to the outdoor scenery surrounding the hotel, the fitness room obviously offers ample space and equipment for away from home workouts.

As I’m sure you can guess, there is a subtle message in this post! Upload your hotel photos from any hotel page on TravelPost.com. It’s just the right thing to do.

Simply put, I think TravelPost.com’s new U.S. Airport Wireless Guide rocks the house. It includes comprehensive wi-fi information for over 130 U.S. airports. We’re talking pricing information, service providers, coverage areas and more.

Why would we, a company dedicated to being the premier source for unbiased hotel reviews, go to all the trouble to create such a guide? Basically, we noticed a need. (We also have some really cool summer interns. Thanks Alex!) We noticed that most airport wi-fi guides and charts included some useful information, but not everything a frequent flyer would want to know. We hunted around for a comprehensive guide that identified multiple wireless service providers for each airport, wi-fi pricing information, coverage areas and basic airport information. We couldn’t find a resource that suited our needs. So we created one. We hope you check it out, bookmark it and consult it often (and yes, this is the royal we speaking…)

We’ll be updating our U.S. Airport Wireless Guide to keep the information accurate. We also welcome any corrections or updates about airport wi-fi that you may want to send us via the official TravelPost.com Contact Form.