Despite the recession, 85 percent of travelers plan to stay in a hotel this summer, according to a recent survey conducted by TravelPost, the most comprehensive hotel information site on the Web.

Sixty-five percent of those surveyed will consider visiting a nearby U.S. city this summer in order to save money. Even cities like New York and Los Angeles offer reasonably priced accommodations. Here are TravelPost’s hotel picks for the Best Big City Bargains:

1. The Pod Hotel (pictured), New York, NY (Rates start at $106 per night)

2. The Standard Hotel, Los Angeles, Calif. (Rates start at $149 per night)

3. Hotel Indigo Chicago Downtown Gold Coast, Chicago, Ill. (Rates start at $219 per night)

4. Hotel Sofitel, Philadelphia, Penn. (Rates start at $162 per night)

5. Holiday Inn Express Hotel & Suites, Dallas, Texas (Rates start at $86 per night)

6. Hotel Vertigo, San Francisco, Calif. (Rates start at $116 per night)

7. Constitution Inn, Boston, Mass. (Rates start at $169 per night)

8. Doubletree Guest Suites Atlanta-Galleria, Atlanta, Ga. (Rates start at $83 per night)

9. Residence Inn Washington, Washington, D.C. (Rates start at $231 per night)

10. Hotel Icon, Houston, Texas (Rates start at $167 per night)

Keep reading the TravelPost Insider for more Top 10 Travel Lists….

Boutique hotels often offer the luxury and scene of a high-end hotel without the high-end price tag.  Sure the room is small, but you’re likely to find the bars and restaurants filled with beautiful people and perhaps a celebrity or two. Here are TravelPost’s picks for the Best Big City Boutique Hotels:

1. The James Hotel (pictured), Chicago, Ill.  (Rates start at $235 per night)

2. Hotel Monaco Seattle, Seattle, Wash. (Rates start at $192 per night)

3. The Blakely, New York, NY  (Rates start at $266 per night)

4. Orchard Garden Hotel, San Francisco, Calif.  (Rates start at $141 per night)

5. Hotel Victor, Miami Beach, Fla. (Rates start at $265 per night)

6. Hotel Angeleno, Los Angeles, Calif. (Rates start at $148 per night)

7. Hotel Burnham, Chicago, Ill. (Rates start at $160 per night)

8. The Liberty Hotel, Boston, Mass. (Rates start at $277 per night)

9. The Georgian Terrace Hotel, Atlanta, Ga. (Rates start at $132 per night)

10. The Latham Hotel, Philadelphia, Penn. (Rates start at $149 per night)

The newest – and by most estimations, only – luxurious lodging option between Boston and Providence, RI is scheduled to open today in Foxborough.

With its location opposite Gillette Stadium and slick interiors, the Renaissance Boston Hotel and Spa at Patriot Place hopes to attract New England travelers who, until now, have been forced to seek out full-service, upscale accommodations about 20 miles away in Boston.

Despite being the obvious hotel choice for Patriots fans with cash to burn, we hear the hotel reportedly expects most of its guests to be business travelers, though a high-end spa slated to open in June and close proximity to outlet shopping will likely help attract a fair share of leisure guests as well.

Just don’t expect to see NFL stars cruising through the hallways on your next visit. Oddly enough, the hotel apparently does not have enough meeting space to accommodate visiting teams and will not be a standard choice for them, according to hotel management.

Players may not be physically present in the hotel, but guests will have plenty of reminders that they’re in field goal range of prime NFL territory. Not only do many rooms offer stadium views (as you can see in the rendering shown above), they are done up in Patriots-inspired red hues.

Where do you stay when you’re looking for luxury accommodations near Boston? We’d love to know.

Keep reading the TravelPost.com Insider for more new hotel openings….

The Washington Marriott at Metro Center spent $4 million to upgrade its restaurant and lobby area, and what’s the first thing the Washington Post restaurant reviewer has to say about it? If you’re thinking it’s about the food, think again.

Instead of mentioning the menu at Fire and Sage, located inside the hotel, writer Tom Sietsema takes a bite out of the dining room’s decor. His impression? That expensive facelift completed in January 2009 has yielded an eatery that channels the swankitude of W Hotel.

Still, the new Washington, DC dining destination is one Sietsema says is worth a visit for its menu of American comfort food-inspired dishes, not to mention the free valet parking that comes with a meal here.

Travelposters recommend the hotel for a “high-end feel at a low-end cost,” and the location near the Metro and attractions like the National Mall and Convention Center.

Not full yet? Keep reading for more foodie travel…

That free USA Today newspaper you’ve come to count on outside your hotel room door may soon be a chapter in hotel history. Marriott announced this week that it will no longer distribute free newspapers each morning to guest rooms at its Courtyard hotels and Residence Inns and plans to halt automatic delivery of complimentary papers at its full-service Marriott properties in June.

Courtyard and Residence Inn guests will still find a variety of free newspapers available in the lobby, while guests at full-service properties will be able to request morning newspaper delivery when they check-in. Members of Marriott’s rewards program will be able to adjust their member profiles so that they receive the newspaper of their choice during their visits.

The company says the move is due to lack of customer demand and will cut the hotel group’s newspaper distribution by an estimated 18 million newspapers a year.

Move over snow globes, postcards and shot glasses emblazoned with florescent palm trees. There’s a a whole new breed of hotel souvenir setting up shop in Miami. Instead of the tacky take-homes cluttering most hotel gift shop shelves, the Mondrian South Beach has opted for an alternative with as much ooh-la-la appeal as its high-design interiors.

The Mondrian’s Semi-Automatic vending machine offers visitors to the South Beach hotel an array of sleek, sexy items priced from $10 to $1.2 million, the AP reports. Press a button on the machine located in the hotel’s posh lobby, and you could head home with such memorable items as 24 karat gold handcuffs, a dress by Jean Paul Gaultier, a sunset dinner cruise for two or even a Bentley Azure Convertible.

The Morgan Hotel Group apparently has plans to roll out more of the souped-up vending machines at its other hotel properties in the hopes of helping guests feel like “rock stars.” And while the recession may prevent many guests from pulling the trigger on expensive items, the word-of-mouth buzz the machines are creating for the hotel are worth their cost in advertising dollars alone….

Have you visited the Mondrian South Beach? Tell us about your stay.

Keep reading for more unusual travel news….

One of the most prominent trends in hotels these days also happens to be one of the riskiest guest-pleasing gambles to hit the travel industry in the last decade. Open bathrooms are increasingly common in hotels around the world, but, as the New York Times points out, the allure of such a room feature shifts dramatically depending on the circumstances. Traveling solo? Why not bask in the freedom of an open bathroom with transparent glass walls? But when you’re an adult sharing the room with dear old dad…not so much. Even for many couples, see-through walls and exposed toilets offer a little too much information.

While some hotels boast about their bare-it-all bathrooms, just what kind you’ll encounter upon arrival is often a mystery that unravels only after check-in.

Here, a handful of hotels with open bathrooms and their various features:

Hotel le Germain – A shade with automatic blinds (pictured above) allows guests at the Toronto hotel to gaze into the bedroom from the bathroom, while a transparent glass wall separates bathroom and bedroom and leaves the shower visible from the main room.

The Tides – This Miami hotel offers glass showers that are visible from the bedrooms.

Radisson Edwardian Leicester Square – This London hotel offers rooms with glass-walled bathrooms.

Renaissance Beijing Hotel – The bathrooms at this Beijing hotel have glass walls and exposed toilets.

Sanderson Hotel - Bathrooms entirely encased in glass walls let guests see it all at this trendy London hotel.

Mandarin Oriental Miami – Some rooms have glass walls that leave the toilet visible from the bedroom.

Have you stayed at a hotel with an open bathroom? Why not review it for us?

When we read about the new Hotel Check-In content area on USA Today, we knew we had to check it out. After all, TravelPost.com is all about hotels, so we knew we’d be in good company.

Called a “community” by the newspaper’s web site and moderated by travel reporter Barbara DeLollis, Hotel Check-In looks and functions much like a blog, but also offers user forums for site visitors to post and discuss their travel-related queries.

With only 16 posts under its belt, it’s hard to fairly assess the content, but it looks to be a solid source of information for the business traveler with a hotel junkie streak, the perfect kind of fodder for those who enjoy a good old debate on the merits of competing chains (e.g. see today’s post on Courtyard vs. Hyatt Place) alongside a daily dose of travel news and deals.

While the forums have potential, there are only a few posts to that content area right now and all of the threads were started by DeLollis.

The real upside for travelers, it seems, is the insider information DeLollis will be able to deliver based on her years of reporting and her knowledge of and access to the industry and its players. In many ways, the arrival of Hotel Check-In is a clear sign of the times announcing the ever-increasing shift of professional reporters into the blogosphere. In the travel space, it’s a development that can only benefit travelers by bringing them reliable, well-researched information they can use during their travels.

For all fun and adventure traveling entails, those who do it frequently know how difficult it is to eat healthy meals when you’re dining out day after day – and often grabbing whatever is within arm’s reach between flights at airport kiosks and eateries. When you’re on vacation, what you eat may not matter as much. After all, you’ll be back home and on your normal routine again all too soon. But for business travelers, the challenges of eating on the road can easily lead to a 10 lb weight increase over the course of a year, warns personal trainer Annette Lang in her recent post on Peter Greenberg’s site.

To combat unintended traveler’s tummy, Lang recommends spending some time trying to identify the times when you overeat so you can be on the alert and act differently in the future. She also suggests taking time to prep before meals during a trip by checking menus for healthy items in advance online, staying away from the bread basket, watching alcohol intake, halving large portions and bringing your own sandwich to snack on.

Perhaps Lang’s best advice, though, is to think of eating healthy much like you’d think about work by creating a strategy that works for you, planning ahead and focusing on one change at a time in order to reach your goals.

[Source: Gulliver]

[Photo: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos]

- Get out the candles. You can stay free on your birthday when you book three or more nights at the Walt Disney World Dolphin Resort and the Walt Disney World Swan Resort.

- For thrifty foodies, we hear that Milan is the place to be (and eat).

- Just about everyone has a travel sale or deal to offer this week. Check out the Hotels.com spring sale to save 30 percent on hotel rooms, Southwest Airlines for fares starting at $49 each way, JetBlue for free tickets when you fly west from Boston two or more times this spring, AirTran for flights starting at $39 each way and American Airlines or Continental Airlines for sale fares on business class tickets to Europe this summer. Also, Travelocity has waived booking fees.

- The Economist muses on the curious marriage of birdwatching and business travel.

- There’s a ruckus brewing in Switzerland over the uncomfortable-sounding nude hiking trend.

- Travelers can now download paperless boarding passes for Delta flights out of Atlanta.

- The Greenbrier resort in West Virginia has filed for bankruptcy, but will continue to operate thanks to a $50 million boost from Marriott.

- Sweden’s Ice Hotel is reportedly getting into the space travel business.