Thailand has long been a relatively inexpensive vacation destination for U.S. travelers, but these days, the Southeast Asia country is hungrier than ever for tourists. Airlines, hotels, resorts and retail shops in popular Thai tourist areas have cut rates and prices this year in an effort to convince travelers from abroad to visit despite an ailing global economy, swine flu fears and years of political unrest in the country’s southernmost region, a recent AP story reports.

Tourism officials in Thailand expect the domestic tourism industry to suffer a $5.6 billion loss this year over last, thanks to a deep decline in visitors.

While we’d recommend being cognizant of and well-informed about the political issues at play in the country before booking a trip, the unrest there over the last five years certainly hasn’t stopped plenty of tourists from enjoying all that Thailand has to offer. If this country has ranked highly on your list of must-see destinations around the world and you’ve been waiting for an economically-savvy time to go, there are plenty of deals to be had in ‘09, especially during the low season that lasts through early fall. Among them:

- Stay in the Peninsula Hotel Bangkok, and, along with a $100 credit for dining during your stay, you’ll also receive a second night free good for stays at Peninsula properties around the globe.

- A round of golf and a spa treatment now come free to guests who stay two nights at the Mandarin Oriental Dhara Dhevi.

- Through October, Marriott hotels around the country such as the JW Marriott Hotel Bangkok are currently offering up to 50 percent off rates to travelers who pay for their stay at least 21 days in advance.

- Thai Airways is offering free connecting domestic tickets to passengers flying in from Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand.

- AirAsia tickets from Bangkok to domestic airports around the country can be had for an impressively low $10.

Keep reading the TravelPost Insider for more current travel deals….

Was your last hotel room worth the price you paid for it? That’s the question behind European hotel site recently released hotel.info’s Value for Money index of three- and four-star hotels around the world. Keeping in mind the price they paid for an overnight stay, guests were asked to rate the value and service they received during their stay on a scale of 1 to 10.

Not surprisingly, major cities with a history of high hotel rates (think New York, London and Los Angeles) did not make the list. But some places you might not expect (Tokyo, Stockholm and Paris) rank in the survey’s top 20 (listed here alongside average ratings):

1. Tokyo 7.84
2. Lisbon 7.71
3. Prague 7.66
4. Berlin 7.60
5. Beijing 7.35
6. Warsaw 7.33
7. Ottawa 7.29
8. Athens 7.24
9. Istanbul 7.14
10. Dublin 7.13
11. Madrid 7.09
12. Zagreb 7.07
13. Singapore 7.00
14. Paris 6.96
15. Bangkok 6.91
16. Amsterdam 6.68
17. Washington 6.52
18. Rome 6.49
19. Rio de Janeiro 6.33
20. Stockholm 5.86

It’s important to note that an earlier survey conducted by hotel.info back in September offered quite different results. Just a few months ago, Las Vegas held the number one spot, while Tokyo wasn’t even in the top 20. Ponder. Discuss.

The latest example of the economic downturn’s far-reaching effects on the travel industry? The small country of Bhutan, located in the Himalayas and home to the remote Taktshang Monastery pictured above, has decided to suspend an annual hike in the cost-per-traveler fees visitors must pay to enter the country.

Instead, next year’s fees will remain the same as those charged by the small nation’s government in 2008. Depending on the time of year and number of people in your party, fees range from $165 to $240 per person, per day. Fees are higher for individual travelers and cheapest for groups of three or more traveling together, especially during the low season months of July and August.

Where are The World’s Dirtiest Cities? Forbes recently came up with a list. The 25 cities deemed the world’s dirtiest won their places on the list with disease-infested water supplies, life-threatening air pollution, plentiful raw sewage and rank public sanitation problems. Drum roll, puh-lease. The cities are:

1. Baku, Azerbaijan (pictured)

2. Dhaka, Bangladesh

3. Antananarivo, Madagascar

4. Port au Prince, Haiti

5. Mexico City, Mexico

6. Addis Abada, Ethiopia

7. Mumbai, India

8. Baghdad, Iraq

9. Almaty, Kazakhstan

10. Brazzaville, Congo

11. Ndjamena, Chad

12. Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

13. Bangui, Central African Republic

14. Moscow, Russia

15. Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

16. Bamako, Mali

17. Pointe Noire, Congo

18. Lome, Togo

19. Conakry, Guinea Republic

20. Nouakchott, Mauritania

21. Niamey, Niger

22. Luanda, Angola

23. Maputo, Mozambique

24. New Delhi, India

25. Port Harcourt, Nigeria

Upon perusing new-ish mapping site MapJack for the first time, I was pretty much blown away. Sure, the site only covers a bizarre coupling of cities right now – San Francisco and Chiang Mai, Thailand – but its imaging technology allows you to enter addresses or points of interest, locate them on high-resolution photographic maps and maneuver right up to the front of buildings, pan left and right, turn in circles, zoom in and out and easily switch to nearby vantage points marked on the maps by blue dots.

I was able to easily read building numbers, street signs and even the friggin’ credit card stickers on the doors of several local businesses. Not bad. It’s a cool tool on so many levels, but for travelers, it offers an easy way to view the area a particular hotel is in or the kinds of shops in a certain neighborhood you’re planning to visit on your next trip. It can also give armchair travelers a candid view of popular tourist destinations like Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco or Three Kings Square in Chiang Mai.

I’m not sure how often they update the images, but looking at several spots in San Francisco that I know well, they’re quite current despite not being in real time.

The company is working to make maps of the following destinations available soon:

* Lake Tahoe

* Yosemite National Park

* Pacifica

* Palo Alto

* San Jose

* Las Vegas

One word of caution: make sure you have a few minutes to spare before you start playing around with MapJack. I got sucked in and – bam – there went the morning.

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.

Further proving that all-business class flights are as popular as ever (despite the demise of MaxJet), Singapore Airlines has announced plans to convert its Airbus A340-500 planes into all-business class flights outfitted with 30-inch-wide seats that double as flat beds. When they take to the skies in between June and September of this year, the newly configured planes will fly the airline’s Singapore to New York and Singapore to LAX routes.

Singapore Airlines to Launch First All-Business Class Flights From USA to Asia

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.)

Although no one we know can provide us with an eyewitness account, we hear tell that a new airline was spotted in the skies this week: Air Yeti.

Aiming to be the low-cost carrier of choice for travelers in Nepal, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the Air Arabia-owned airline has its hub in Kathmandu, Nepal and flies to destinations that include Bangkok, Delhi, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Sharjah and Doha.