Does Villa d’Este deserve the distinction of World’s Best Hotel? Forbes and a panel made up of seasoned luxury travelers that included the likes of travel expert Peter Greenberg, chef Todd English and Esquire columnist John Mariani say the opulent property outside of Milan delivers, so much so that they’ve named it the single best hotel property in the world:

One hotel stood tall at the top of the list. Villa d’Este beat out Bangkok’s venerable Peninsula and Hong Kong’s Landmark Mandarin Oriental. It edged out the beloved Four Seasons Hotel George V in Paris, and even outshone the self-described seven-star Burj al Arab in Dubai.

What makes Villa d’Este worthy of such fanfair? The Forbes story doesn’t reveal the criteria it used for choosing the hotel, but does make much of its storied list of famous guests (everyone from Greta Garbo to Bill Gates has stayed there), as well as its location on Italy’s Lake Como, historic past (it was a private residence for nearly three centuries before opening as a hotel in 1873) and general reputation. Oh yeah, and the hotel has its own helicopter.

Have you stayed at Villa d’Este? Tell us about it.

Staycations are, like, so last summer, according to the Annual Summer Travel Survey by our sister site Kayak.com. Of the 4,100 people in this year’s survey, an impressive 95 percent said they plan to travel this summer. And while travelers remain concious of the economy, more than 41 percent of respondants said the recession would not affect their summer travel plans in any way.

Why the enthusiam for travel this summer? For one thing, lower airfares and frequent fare sales are making it more affordable to fly in ‘09, while an abundance of travel deals are taking some of the burden off lodging at resorts and hotels.

For summer trips, major U.S. cities and European countries are among the most popular destinations, while domestic beaches and the Caribbean are close runners up.

Even though they plan to travel this summeer, travelers say they are embracing all the cost-saving strategies they can find. To help travelers stay on top of extra fees and find the best deals available, Kayak has launched new tools that include a baggage fee calculator to instantly add additional fees and update airfare prices on its search results page, a hotel rate calendar that shows the average daily rate over the last two months for any of its 197,000+ hotels and an option to select the airports you want searched when you look for airfare.

Along with its own travel tools, Kayak offered up the following tips and reminders for recession-proofing your summer 2009 vacation:

- Try a cruise if you’re looking for a serious bargain

- The Caribbean offers many deals during summer months

- Visiting Europe is much cheaper this summer now that fuel surcharges are gone and the dollar is strengthening against the Euro and British Pound

For more ways to save, try Kayak.com tools such as Kayak Flexible Search, Weekend Search, Buzz Calendar, Airfare History charts and Fare Alert tracker.

Keep reading the TravelPost.com Insider’s deals section for more ways to save on your summer 2009 travel….

- 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.

New U.S. visa waiver rules took effect on Monday requiring all travelers entering the United States under the visa waiver program to pre-register online at least 72 hours before their arrival instead of following the traditional practice of filling out forms at the airport or on the airplane.

Created as an added security measure, the new protocol applies to citizens of the 35 countries that currently participate in the U.S. visa waiver program. The list includes the UK, Sweden, France, Australia, Germany, New Zealand and others. Once approved, travelers receive authorization that’s good for up to two years and for multiple entry dates.

[Source: AP]

And now for the winner in the strangest vacation souvenir category…. A traveler spooked Munich airport security yesterday when she arrived fresh from her Brazilian vacation en route to Naples with none other than her own brother’s skeletal remains stuffed in her luggage. But this was no sicko crime gone awry. The woman, an Italian, was simply fulfilling her dead brother’s last wish, to be taken from the place of his death, Sao Paulo, and buried in his homeland’s soil. And she had the documentation from the Brazilian government to prove it – a very important point, as authorities are not known for relying solely on verbal explanations where skeletal remains are concerned.

Woman Stopped Over Skeleton in Luggage

If you’re going to be in New York this weekend and you love travel, consider checking out the New York Times Travel Show, a veritable smorgasbord of travel information from resorts, hotels, spas, cruise lines, tour operators, tourist agencies and adventure travel companies from around the world. Along with vendor booths and live entertainment performances representing a vast array of cultures, the show features a Taste of the World Pavilion filled with international cuisine and cooking demonstrations, a Spa Pavilion offering sample treatments and discounted packages at spa resorts, travel author appearances and special travel deals offered to folks brave enough to book their next vacation on the spot. And with travel experts Rick Steves, Arthur Frommer, Ian Wright and Stephanie Abrams – among many others – leading seminars, the show offers a rare chance for face-to-face learning from leading peeps in the industry. Cost: $15.

Yeah, last minute travel can be cool. But it can also leave you cash poor, especially when you’re talking high-season travel in major vacation destinations. But as with most things in life, a just little edumuhcation can go a long way. Case in point: Kayak.com’s Fare Alerts.

Create a Fare Alert (or 12) on Kayak.com or SideStep.com for the summer getaway(s) currently sequestered in your noggin by clicking on the “Get fare alerts for this trip” link on the top right-hand corner of the flight results page. You can track fares for specific dates, a flexible span of time (e.g. summer weekends or, say, the month of June) or an entire region (e.g. Europe). When your daily or weekly Fare Alert (you choose how often it arrives) touches down in your email inbox, you’ll be able to make informed travel decisions.

Depending on what you ask it to track (specific dates, flexible span of time or even top cities in a region), each Fare Alert can show you:

- How much the fare for specific dates has increased or decreased in dollars since the last alert

- The airfare history for your trip dates based on searches made by Kayakers over the past 90 days

- A snapshot of prices in Kayak.com’s matrix view, so you can quickly compare prices by carrier and number of stops

- The lowest fare available during a specific span of time (e.g. the next four weekends)

- The best fares available for popular destination cities in a region you want to visit (e.g. Africa)

Who knows, maybe you’ll still pay craptons to travel to the most expensive resort on the hottest island right in the middle of the high season. After all, it’s high season for a reason. But at least you’ll be pimping it out with full knowledge of your unbridled American excess. Just remember the wisdom of G.I. Joe.

(**Editor’s note: Yeah, Kayak.com owns us. You wanna make something of it? I’ll have you know I was surreptitiously using Fare Alerts to aid in making my personal travel plans long before Kayak.com bought our parent company SideStep.com in December. Nepotism, bias, blah, blah, blah. Fare Alerts just make good travel sense.)

As we first read on Luxist (Dionne Warwick Loses Her Jewels in Italy), five-time Grammy award-winning singer Dionne Warwick, who, for some reason, I remember best for hosting Solid Gold in 1985, was the victim of theft on Monday at the five-star Hotel de Russie in Rome. Among the missing items, said to total more than $100,000, were two rings, a necklace, a watch and a pair of earrings Warwick left sitting on her room’s bedside table. Interestingly enough, this celebrity robbery was not the first the room (or the hotel) has seen. In a bizarre coincidence, Cameron Diaz reportedly dealt with her own set of robbers while she was bunking in the very same room seven years ago.

If you were to stay at the Hotel de Russie, we would suggest warding off would-be thieves by booking the hotel’s Do Not Disturb package, which includes overnight accommodations for two, a Champagne breakfast served in the room, a bottle of Prosecco, a box of chocolates and an in-room couple’s massage. Rates start at 975 Euro per night for a studio room and go quite a ways up from there. A two-night minimum stay is required for the package. Oh, and we also suggest using the in-room safe.

Tourists who chuck their soda cans, waggle toes in the City’s canals and abandon t-shirts for the bare-chested look (we’re talking men here) may be intercepted and fined by Venice’s newly created Office of Decorum. But perhaps just as humorous is the way the government’s Decorum office has decided to go about breaking the bad news. Instead of tasking regular police with the job, the City has hired legions of multi-lingual female “hostesses” to patrol St. Mark’s Square and dole out penalties ranging from 50 to 500 euro. I guess it’s just easier to take a reprimand from a pretty young woman, and the government knows it. Interestingly, slovenly Americans are not the chief targets, but rather European day-tripper tourists who often bring their own food and picnic outside.

Venice Slaps Fines on Sloppy, Shirtless Tourists

That’s the premise behind the Vatican’s new charter airline service run by Mistral Air. The low-cost service launched today in Rome and plans to fly 150,000 passengers annually on routes connecting destinations of religious import (think Rome, Santiago de Compostela, Lourdes).

The one thing I can’t figure out is how one can book seats on these flights and how much they cost. The Mistral Air web site is only available in Italian none of the info I’ve found thus far online mentions booking or cost.

Vatican Airline Takes to the Sky