Is This the Most Insane Airline Fee Yet?

We recently asked our Budget Travel audience to tell us about their biggest hotel pet peeves, a question that sparked 39 comments on our blog post and 31 more on our Facebook page. Conversely, this got us wondering what your favorite things about staying in a hotel are—is it the fluffly towels, comfy beds, or friendly service? It turns out we aren't the only ones thinking about the best and worst parts of the hotel experience. The site TrustYou recently released a study revealing travelers' 20 biggest complaints and 20 compliments about hotels around the world. The lists rank customer complaints and compliments by the number of mentions they received in one million online comments and hotel reviews written on more than 200 websites or on various social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The results show that customer service is number one for travelers, taking up multiple spots on both lists—it ranked higher than clean rooms or affordable prices. The top 20 things hotel guests like about hotels:1. Friendly, professional, efficient service 2. Great, well-situated location3. Good room 4. Great food 5. Great breakfast 6. Clean room and hotel7. Large room8. Good, affordable price9. Good bed10. Nice view11. Good pool12. Good bathroom13. Easy, available parking14. New room15. Free internet16. Good sauna and wellness facilities17. Quiet room18. New hotel19. Free parking20. Efficient reception The top 20 things hotel guests complain about:1. Unprofessional and incompetent service2. Small room3. Expensive or overpriced hotel4. Tasteless, bad breakfast5. Bad food6. Dirty room7. Unfriendly service8. Bad bathroom9. Bad service10. Loud, noisy room11. Tasteless food12. Bad bed13. Small bathroom14. Hard to find or the hotel was in an isolated location15. Internet not available or scarce service16. Old room17. Bad location18. Dirty bathroom19. Expensive or overpriced breakfast20. Bad parkingDo you agree with the placement of the items on the list? What factors are most important to you when you stay in a hotel?

Are you part of the more than one-third of Americans that have a passport? According to an article by Forbes, almost 110 million people now hold a U.S. passport. That's a huge jump from 48 million Americans that had one in 2000, and the just 7 million Americans with passports back in 1989. People are traveling more than ever—how else do you expect to get those passport stamps worth bragging about? Travel blogger C.G.P. Grey recently published an infographic breaking down U.S. passport ownership state-by-state based on figures from passport statistics on the Data.gov website. Grey found that the states with the highest number of passport holders (more than 60 percent of residents) included Alaska, California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. What about the states with the lowest number of U.S. passport holders? About 20 percent of residents of Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee, and West Virginia have one, while less than 20 percent of Mississippians are passport holders.   Still don't have a passport? Apply through the U.S. Department of State. As of right now, fees are $135 for an adult passport book or $110 to renew your current passport. A U.S. Passport Card is also available (and necessary if you don't have a regular passport) for Americans planning to visit Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Bermuda by land or sea—these cannot be used for international travel by air—and fees are $55 for adults or $30 to renew.

In the past decade, a wealth of new bus lines such as Megabus, Vamoose, and Bolt Bus have made it easier and cheaper to travel by ground (here are six of our favorite budget bus companies).  Bus travel has increased accordingly (you may remember the DePaul University study Sean O'Neill quoted last year showing that bus travel had risen by 13% in 2011). Train travel is looking good too. President Obama has a vision to increase the speed on our railways-a goal that we took a baby step toward last month when the Amtrak line between Chicago and St. Louis reached 111mph, 30 mph faster than our nation's fastest train (yes, we still have a ways to go before we catch up to those European trains that blast through the continent at 150mph). All of this bodes well for ground transportation in the coming years. And now, a new website is poised to make it easier to search these options and identify the most efficient and affordable combination. The site is called Wanderu and they are calling themselves the "kayak of ground travel." It's not the first website to try to combine ground travel options (there is also BusJunction.com, which is a bus ticket search engine that makes it easy to search schedules and fares from bus carriers across the country), but it is the first metasearch site that I have seen that takes train schedules into consideration. It's about time. We have more options for ground travel than we ever had before, but we still have the problem of identifying the best possible combination to get from point A to point B. The downside, unfortunately, is that the Boston-based start-up is still in private beta and there is no word on when they will officially launch. I have my fingers crossed that Wanderu will succeed as it's a service that an avid ground traveler like myself could benefit from. If not Wanderu, however, I'm sure another company will step in to try their hand at coordinating ground transport. In the meantime, the very existence of sites like Wanderu and BusJunction suggest that we're getting closer to an era when ground transportation will be easier for Americans. I certainly look forward to that day and am thrilled to think that it may be close at hand.