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Yesterday, the Venetian became the latest transplant to open in Macau, which has rapidly morphed into a glitzy, much-hyped gambling haven. Casinos in this former Portuguese colony--a tiny peninsula connected to mainland China and about 40 miles from Hong Kong--already rake in more money than their Vegas counterparts. American billionaire Sheldon Adelson was on hand for the obligatory smashing of a champagne bottle, in this case, against the side of a gondola, one of many floating down the gaudy casino's canals. Touted as the world's largest gambling space, the Venetian Macao-Resort-Hotel has 400 slot machines, 800 gambling tables, 3,000 rooms, and 1.2 million square feet of convention space, according to the AP. The Venetian joins a market recently crowded by casinos like the Sands, also developed by Adelson, and the Wynn Macau, yet the demand seems almost insatiable. (I happened to be in Macau in July 2005, about a year after the Sands opened, and had to wait in line just to enter the jam-packed casino on a weekday afternoon!) Gamblers have long flocked to Macau, but until 2001 they were at the mercy of Stanley Ho and his 40-year monopoly on the local casino industry. For a taste of the old-school gambling scene, make a beeline for Ho's Casino Lisboa--you can't miss it, the roof is shaped like a giant roulette wheel. Photo: Venetian Macao Related: Trip Coach: Hong Kong and Macau.

The airfare prediction website Farecast is taking on hotels, offering rate advice for major properties in 30 U.S. cities. Rather than predict rates, the site tells you if the rate at any given hotel is a good value when compared with the hotel's rate history and other factors. You plug in your dates and preferred neighborhoods to stay at your destination, and then you add your wish list of preferred amenities. The site maps hotels that meet your criteria, along with the lowest rates available and advice on whether to book one or keep looking. As explained to us by Farecast CEO Hugh Crean: If a hotel rate is highlighted in red, it means that the rate is a relatively good deal when compared with the hotel's past history, local demand, and other factors. The buying tip, called a Rate Key, tells you if a hotel's rate is unusually low given its past pricing history and other factors, such as the demand for rooms in the city on particular dates. Farecast crunches the numbers on hotel rate data that it receives from Orbitz and other sources. The site doesn't sell hotel rooms but sends you to these sources for booking. Currently, the buying tips for hotel rates are only available for 5,000 hotels in 30 U.S. cities. Also, Farecast does not collect rates directly from major hotel chains, which often guarantee the lowest rates by booking on their websites. Farecast has made its name as a website that predicts whether fares on a route will rise or fall within the next week. In July, Farecast had more than 500,000 users, according to the Boston Globe. It's the first company to bring data-mining techniques to hotel rates, giving it a head start on its competition. Earlier: A new website lets you tour European hotels from home.

Imagine toting your Chateau Petrus Pomerol on a weekend trip without ever popping its cork. You might do this if you were visiting the Crystal Springs resort in Vernon, N.J., 47 miles from New York City. The resort owns a unique device that can test if a wine is pristine. Since 2006, guests have brought wines for free testing. Chemists at the University of California at Davis--the Harvard of enology--invented the machine with funding from the resort. The machine can test if oxygen has leaked past the cork and allowed the wine to become vinegary. The machine uses nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy--the technology behind MRI scans at hospitals--to test the level of acetic acids in your wine. It's a bad sign when the machine finds a lot of acetic acid. Guests staying at the resort can test one bottle for free, says a spokeswoman for the hotel. To test more than one bottle, guests pay a fee of 10 percent of the value of the wine, with a minimum $50 charge. That's the same fee you'll pay if you're not a guest of the resort but you drop by anyway and request that one of your bottles be tested. Some studies estimate that one in eight bottles of premium wines (meaning wines costing $8 or more) are spoiled. The machine has not been subjected to rigorous independent testing, and it may not be foolproof. High levels of acetic acid or only one of the many possible signs and causes of damage to wine. Learn more about the machine and the resort by calling Crystal Springs at 973/827-5996. Photograph by Linda B. (the Wine Diva), titled "Corkhenge", via Flickr & Creative Commons Related: Check out these articles on wine and travel.

If hotel lobbies aren't your kind of dating scene, you may be interested to learn about three new dating services that are available via cell phone. This month, Match.com launched a mobile dating service that allows its more than one million paying members to send messages to potential dates from their phones, according to Reuters. The service costs an additional $5 a month on top of the $17 a month members pay for six-month contracts. Want something faster? MeetMoi is a new "location-based" dating service. You send a text-message to the website providing your current Zip Code or street address. MeetMoi then tells you if there are any other members of the service who have said they're looking for a date in your area. You also receive info about people whose profiles match your criteria. The service is free to join and costs 99 cents for 10 anonymous text messages. [via SmartMobs] Prefer to talk to someone before you meet them? Zogo is a dating service that connects singles who want to talk by smartphone. Surf to Zogo.com on your phone's Web browser and see a list of singles who meet the criteria you've provided. If you find a member's profile interesting, you can click to ask for a phone call with the person. Zogo then passes along your request to the person via text message. If the other person agrees, you can have an instant phone conversation without each member learning the other's phone number. The service is currently free. [via the Orlando Sentinel] About 3.6 million U.S. cell phones subscribers used a mobile dating service in May, the most recent month with available data, according to the research firm M:Metrics. Photo: MeetMoi publicity Here's advice on flirting for women travelers, as two bar owners and authors told our readers in the 2007 issue of Girlfriend Getaways. Are you comfortable with dating on the fly? Or do these cell phone services make you queasy? Feel free to sound off by posting a comment below. Like this blog? You can keep up to date with the latest travel news with an RSS newsfeed, such as My Yahoo or Bloglines. Every time something is published on this blog at BudgetTravel.com, a copy of the post will be made available to you. Learn more about RSS newsfeeds and how to use them.