I really like these simple and elegant luggage tags. They look great!

View at eBags

The eBags Mother Lode TLS Wheeled Duffle was recently give an awesome review in Outside magazine (“Brawny and balanced…superior construction…rock steady”). I’ve owned a few eBags pieces in my time, and I’ve always found them to be high-quality and an excellent value. I’ve never tried this piece, but it looks like it’d be awesome, and very rugged. And that’s definitely a good thing.

View at eBags

I have a door stop alarm similar to this, and it works great. The piece of mind I get from having one of these is immeasurable. With all the creaks, knocks and bangs I hear in hotels, to know that I can rest easy helps me sleep great!

View more at Magellan’s

Just slip the Slightly Naughty Weekend Kit into your overnight bag, and turn your fun weekend trip into an exciting weekend rendezvous! The kit comes with chocolate scented warming massage oil, strawberry-flavored body dust, a soft feather duster, two satin ties to use as blindfolds or soft ties, two tea lights, and a mini guide with “how to” tips. Who wouldn’t love to be on a weekend trip and have their partner pull this out of their bag?

View at Red Envelope

For today only, all Entertainment Books are on sale for $12 with free shipping! It’s an amazing deal – for $12 you get access to amazing travel deals. By my count they have nearly 50 rental car coupons, including double upgrades, 20% off, and more from the likes of Budget, Alamo, Avis, and more! And the rental car coupons are good until June of 2011.

The 2010 Entertainment Book also has coupons for cruise discounts, hotel discounts, vacation discounts, and more. Oh, and don’t forget the great local restaurant and activity deals. It shouldn’t be difficult to get $12 in value!

View your local book at Entertainment.com!

Consumer Reports just released their ratings and rankings of hotels chains, polled from 27,506 subscribers. What did we learn? There are two important facts from the article: nearly half of all hotel rooms were empty in 2009, and overall guests paid about 9% less for their hotel room in 2009 than in 2008. Those are both amazing numbers.

As far as hotel rankings go, Ritz-Carlton topped the list in the “fanciest” category, Renaissance Hotels won the “luxury” category, and Homewood Suites topped the “upscale” category. The winner in the “moderate” category was Drury Inn & Suites, and the winner in “budget” was Microtel Inns & Suites. Who had bad ratings? Motel 6 and Days Inn had the worst scores in the entire survey for upkeep, service and comfort, and Travelodge, Econo Lodge and didn’t fare much better. That leads to the other takeaway from the article: while there is a big price difference between spending $40 at Days Inn versus $250 at the Ritz-Carlton, you also definitely get what you pay for!

View more details in the June 2010 issue of Consumer Reports, or at ConsumerReports.org.

After much work and much fun, we’ve finally launched our first travel quiz, the Airline Knowledge Quiz. There are 24 questions of varying difficulty, and all you have to do is guess the airline from a small snapshot of their tail.

Take the Airline Knowledge Quiz, and good luck!

Lifehacker linked to a great website at fsi-language-courses.org that offers completely free home language courses. These courses were developed by the Foreign Service Institute, which is part of the United States government, and they are in the public domain, so they are free to use. They offer languages from Amharic to Yoruba (two languages I’ve never even heard of!), and several dozen in between. It’s a great resource, complete with audio courses, workbooks and more.

View all the courses at FSI Language Courses