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

SmarterTravel.com’s list of 10 Amazing Adventures Under $1,000 is a round-up that’s worth reading. They’ve hunted down some cool ideas for adventurous vacations that hit the inexpensive end of the spectrum. And six of the suggested trips (hiking, rafting, camping, sailing, biking) are outside the good ‘ole US of A (Peru, Canada, Croatia, Tanzania, Laos, New Zealand). Trips range in length from four to 10 days. Most are packages offered by tour operators, and none include airfare in the price.

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.)

With two weeks of the year under our belts, we’ve taken stock of the current travel landscape, checked our trend gauges and looked into our crystal balls to come up with our favorite travel trends for 2008.

Flight Flux

Just about the only thing frequent air travelers can count on this year is more change in the friendly skies. Just as the Open Skies agreement ushers in myriad new options for passengers traveling between the United States and Europe when it goes into effect on March 28, the U.S. Department of transportation is considering changes to the rules that govern how airports charge airlines for landing privileges. Instead of basing fees on airplane weight, a recently announced proposal to charge more for flights landing during peak times has the potential to free up airspace, ease airport congestion and encourage airlines to use add flight routes at regional airports. At the same time, the old-guard U.S. carriers (United Airlines, Delta, Northwest, etc.) are considering mergers and threatening to cut the number of flights they offer to offset the now-hideous cost of fuel.

What does all this mean for travelers? Expect frequent changes in flight schedules, available routes and ticket fares in the months to come.

Tech Boom at 30,000 feet

While airlines from JetBlue to American Airlines test in-flight Internet services like web browsing and others usher in the era of mile-high mobile phoning (Emirates, Air France, Qantas), and some are even hard at work on both (Norwegian Air), carriers like 2007’s much-talked about newcomer Virgin Atlantic are spending big bucks to outfit main cabins with high-tech amenities like in-seat chat messaging and myriad personal media options.

We expect this trend to continue as passengers cry for more in-flight services, just as airlines are dying for more ways to make a buck. After all, we may balk at paying for a half-dead turkey sandwich, but many of us would cheerily fork over cash for on-demand movies, in-flight web access and other high-tech perks that make our lives easier and provide much-need distraction from uncomfortable seats, runway delays and annoying seatmates.

Business Lodging Goes Boutique

Once upon at time, boutique hotels were the provenance of moneyed leisure travelers seeking alternatives to business-oriented hotels in destination cities. But now the tables have turned. New brands like NYLO, InterContinental’s Hotel Indigo and Starwood’s Aloft are betting business and frequent travelers will respond to the combination of hip interiors, high-tech business amenities and conveniences like 24-hour and to-go dining options. Thus far, these business boutique properties have flocked not to business hubs like New York and Los Angeles, but to airport locations and nearby secondary cities like Plano, Schaumberg and Nashville.

Looking Beyond Europe

With the both the Euro and the British Pound kicking the dollar’s sorry arse these days, expect fewer Americans to choose Europe as a vacation destination. Instead, more stateside travelers will opt for places where their hard-earned dollars stretch a bit farther. As more flights between North America and Asian countries appear in the coming year, Americans will have increased options for visiting countries like China, Vietnam and Thailand. At the same time, Latin and South American countries also continue to promise a good value for U.S. travelers, many of whom have been trading Paris, Rome and Madrid for places like Buenos Aires, Cusco and Santiago.

Amped-Up Airports

As passengers become more accustomed to delays, flight cancellations and the general uncertainty of modern-day travel, airports around the United States are realizing that, now more than ever, travelers stuck in terminals are veritable cash cows. Along with the airport quick-spas, souped-up luxury lounges for elite travelers and premium retail shops that have been popping up in terminals over the last two years, evermore diversions for travelers are on their way. In the coming year, it will not be unusual for a traveler to sample local vintages at an airport wine bar before settling into a branded high-tech lounge to check email or surf the web before catching a table massage (not just the chair variety) prior to boarding. Increases in practical amenities like cell phone parking lots, universal charging stations, product vending machines and airport pharmacies are also part of this trend, which aims to make airports more than just places to wait.

Maturing Metasearch

We predict that metasearch tools will continue to attract more travelers seeking an efficient way to find airline fares, hotel rates and relevant destination information. With Kayak.com’s recent acquisition of SideStep (parent company of TravelPost.com) and newcomers like Kango busting onto the scene with a ton of buzz, sites that search hundreds of sources for fares and travel information are poised to mature from tools used by the savviest travelers to tools used by everyone.

Freelance writer Lorraine Sanders has been editing the TravelPost.com Insider blog since 2005. You can reach her at news (at) lorrainesanders (dot) com.

It’s your lucky day. Thanks to the wonders of the Internets and handheld video cameras, you can watch Owen Wilson and Woody Harrelson ditch Hollywood to experience the refreshing waters of an irrigation ditch in Peru. (If you want to see a blurry Wilson and Harrelson participate in their own impromptu version of a wet boxer contest, we suggest jumping to minute 5 in the video.)

The pair touched down in Cuzco on Wednesday night and have since shocked the world by staying in a cheap hotel and stripping down to their skivvies to cool off in the aforementioned ditch, located in the Andes mountains. With Wilson and Harrelson visiting this week and celebs from Cameron Diaz to Olivia Newton-John (who’s probably still A-list in Peru) reportedly there this year, this South American country is fast becoming the next uber-hip destination for rich Americans seeking exotic alternatives to the average vacation.

Happy Halloween. It’s that fabulous day of the year when you can get dressed up like a freak, wear clothes far sluttier than you’d ever dare in real life and get totally smashed without remorse. Unless, of course, you’re a kid. In that case, it’s really all about the candy.

Today we check in with some of our favorite travel experts to get into the Halloween, uh, spirit. Instead of blithely regurgitating tales of haunted hotels, ghost towns and places of supposed supernatural import, Concierge.com editor-in-chief Peter Frank (that’s him in the picture) and his team at Conde Nast decided to put their heads together to create a different kind of Halloween story for the web site this year.

Says Frank, “I’ve seen my share of haunted hotels, but we wanted places that will actually creep you out a little bit, places that send chills down your spine.”

And so they have. The World’s Creepiest Places, written by Ralph Martin, follows the axiom that reality is always more frightening than fiction as it roves through 13 (yes, 13) destinations pretty much guaranteed to leave you feeling like you’re on a tour of Rod Serling’s favorite vacation spots.

At the TravelPost.com Insider, we’re constantly fascinated with how travel publications compile their round-ups and select editorial content, so we decided to check in with Frank to get some firsthand information on this seasonal feature from Concierge.com, a.k.a. the home of Conde Nast Traveler.

So why do travelers specifically seek out scary places?

“There are people out there who are just drawn to the slightly macabre…. [Places] where famous events from history happened – there’s just an inherent fascination,” Frank says.

Among the places deemed creepiest by Concierge.com are familiar tourist destinations like the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, Calif., a mysterious mansion built by the wealthy and, by all accounts, disturbed heiress to the Winchester gun fortune and known for features like fake doors and staircases with no destinations.

“Once you’ve heard the story, you go there and get this window into this woman’s mind,” Frank says.

Pause for a brief tangent: The home’s bizarre past becomes all the more intriguing if you imagine our favorite modern-day heiress, Paris Hilton, similarly plagued by voices that instructed her to build and modify the same hotel over and over again until her death. Now that would be cool. And really weird.

And with digital artist Jeremy Blake’s reported devolution into paranoia and subsequent suicide this year, the Winchester House has attained even more creepy cache by association. One of the late artist’s most famous works is entitled Winchester and involves a series of unearthly images based on the mansion’s gothic interiors.

There are other places near and dear to tourists’ hearts, like, say, the stomach-turning displays of anatomical oddities at the Philadelphia Mütter museum and Romania’s Bran Castle, once home to the legendary Vlad the Impaler (upon which the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula was based).

But many of the spots included in the list are remote destinations many travelers will never see. For example, the site of the infamous 1986 Chernobyl power plant explosion that ended the short, sweet life of Pripyat, Ukraine.

“You go there, and it’s a real ghost town. It’s deserted. And things are exactly as they were 20 years ago,” Frank recalls.

And then there is the remote Easter Island (a five+ hour flight from Chile), where heavy-browed moai sculptures are the only remains of the now-extinct Rapa Nui people who once inhabited the island. If that’s not ultra creepy, we don’t know what is. Just looking at the landscape gives us chills:

What you won’t find in this list are sites where crimes against humanity and gross human atrocities have occurred.

“We didn’t do anything that was too sensitive. We wanted to have places that were distant enough in the past,” Frank says of the few locations with devastating histories attached.

One ultra-creepy spot that didn’t make the list for that very reason?

According to Frank, “We almost did the Jonestown massacre, but we decided it was just too gruesome.”

Yup. And on top of that, in the years since the Jonestown Massacre, the nearby town of Port Kaituma, Guyana has not exactly rebounded into the next vacation hotspot. Today, in fact, it’s largely home to transient workers who come to the nearby jungles to hunt for gold.

And with that, we bid you adieu. It’s time to go put our face paint on. Be sure to check out all 13 of the World’s Creepiest Places on Concierge.com.

Yes, Bolivia has decided to treat us exactly as we treat them by requiring U.S. visitors to obtain tourist visas beginning Dec. 1, 2007. A 3-day tourist visa will cost $134, which is comparable to what Bolivians have to fork over to come here. While some hint that the decision reflects the country’s cozy relationships with U.S. opponents Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, plenty of countries require visas for entry. And filling out a few forms is well worth the effort to see some of the world’s less frequented places.

Bolivia to Require Visas for U.S. Tourists Soon

If you’re like me, Medellin (Columbia) only recently popped onto your internal radar screen after becoming addicted to HBO’s Entourage. Despite its gritty, violent history, Medellin has been making a comeback - and not just on U.S. television screens. The International Herald Tribune’s Grace Bastidas writes:

But in the last decade, this city of two million, with its beautiful colonial architecture and year-round springlike weather, has awakened from its drug nightmare. Escobar and his minions are gone and the cocaine trade has been largely dispersed. Bullet-riddled neighborhoods are coming to life with art museums and well-designed parks. And the constant rumble of construction - new shopping malls, flashy casinos and luxury hotels - can be heard throughout the city.

Hit up the link below for a great article about the city and its revival over the last decade.

Medellín, a Former Drug Battleground, is Reborn

Here’s a cool new offering from Lonely Planet: Pick & Mix downloads that allow customers to buy individual chapters from Lonely Planet guidebooks and download them as PDFs. The Caribbean Islands, Latin America and South America are the first regions available through this buy-by-chapter download program. It’s a great option if you plan to visit, say, the Guatemala highlands and the Pacific Slope, but could care less about Guatemala City or Central and Eastern Guatemala. Just throw down for the chapters you need. And at $2 a pop, it’s totally affordable.