Southern France is a great wine destination, and produces some of the world’s best wine. Luxury travelers can enjoy this wine on French wine tasting tours, which can cover the regions of Bordeaux, Burgundy, Chamapgne, Alsace, and the Rhone Valley and Provence. French Wine Explorers (no affiliation) seems to be a good wine tasting tour company that specializes in French wine trips.

Many of the tours offered by French Wine Explorers start at around $4,000 per person, and last for four days.

If you are not very fond of the group tour idea, consider a private French wine tour. A private wine tour in France will allow travelers to really immerse themselves into wine with the one-on-one coaching by the tour guide. It also offers unlimited options, flexibility, and luxury because of the personal service that they offer you.

So if you are a wine enthusiast, and want to have fun while learning more about your hobby, consider a French wine tasting tour to compliment your luxury shopping in Paris and other Paris attractions.

Amtrak GrandLuxe

Amtrak’s new luxury train service is called GrandLuxe Limited. This luxury train service is offered on a completely separate, seven car luxurty train attached to normal Amtrak trains on regular Amtrak train routes. So between November and January, there will be about 90 luxury GrandLuxe Limited routes offered by Amtrak.

Luxury Train features

The GrandLuxe experience offers travelers private cabins, exquisite meals in dining cabins, comfortable lounge cabins, and a romantic and beautiful view of the landscape as you travel across the nation. These modern luxury trains are attempting to offer the vintage and romantic feeling of upscale rail travel that our nation use to love.

Prices and Itineraries

GrandLuxe Limited routes have itineraries that are two to three days long, and cost between $790 and $2,500. If you want longer rail trips, GrandLuxe Rail Journeys offer passengers trips up to ten days long in an even more luxurious 21 car train.

The destinations offered include a Washington DC - Chicago route, Chicago - Albuquerque route, and a Denver - San Francisco. In addition to these shorter routes, there are many journeys that are more sight seeing vacations. Here is a map of these rail journeys, which zig zag across the parks of the Western US.

So if you’re interested in experiencing luxury travel in a way that is vintage and historical, Luxury rail travel may be of interest to you.

Luxury Amtrak Official Announcement - GrandLuxe Rail Official site

Hong Kong features many luxury shopping opportunities to luxury travelers. Much of Hong Kong’s best shopping can be found in an area known as Queen’s Road Central.

Hong Kong Queen’s Road Shops

Queen’s Road central is home to many upscale fashion stores like Louis Vuitton, Guicci, Valextra, Zeepha Couture, and Dison yewn. Another favorite of luxury shoppers is Joyce Boutique, which is a department store and beauty hall. Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake. In the store’s beauty hall, shoppers (mostly women I’m assuming) can purchase trendy beauty products and even get your own makeover.

Best Luxury Products in Hong Kong

So now that you know Hong Kong shopping offers every upscale shop travelers could want, what should you buy? Luxury shoppers to Hong Kong usually rave about the great designers watches available. Rolex, Cartier, Patek, and Phillipe watches can all be found for prices 30% lower than typical watch prices. They’re lower, not because they are fake, but because there are not luxury watch taxes in Hong Kong. So the savings is passed on to luxury shoppers.

Hong Kong Harbour City Shopping

Another great luxury shopping location in Hong Kong offering the top luxurious shopping brands is Harbour City. Harbour City is in Tsim Sha Tsui, and has over 700 shops. Harbour City is bound to have something for everyone, and in addition to its immense shopping options, it also has many dining options to visitors.

Flat Seats

FlatSeats.com is a great resource for flat airline seats. It’s a really helpful site with all the information luxury travelers need to know about sleeping on flat airline seats. Its greatest feature is its flat seat comfort reviews that were created by actual travelers who experienced the seats. The reviews cover Air France, US Airways, NWA (World business class pictured above), and Singapore Airlines, just to name a few. They have reviews on pretty much every airline offering lie flat seats.

Airline Seat Guru

Another, larger airline seat website that has even more information on airline seats is SeatGuru.com. Seat Guru has a massive database of information on International First Class seats and International business class seats. Seat Guru is very comprehensive, and includes information about seat sizes and amenities, including laptop power, video type, and other power type.

So if you’re looking for the best lie flat or business class seats for your long haul over international waters, you have no excuse to get stuck with a subpar luxury seat.

No Paris trip, luxury or not, is complete without a visit or glimpse to one of these famous Paris attractions. So take a break from your luxury shopping in Paris to go out and visit these great attractions.

The Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower, the former “world’s tallest building” created for the world fair in the 1890’s is still the symbol for Paris, and France as a whole. Today, it is one of the most visited monuments in the world, and it’s first and second floors are often visited for their great views of the city.

Musee du Louvre

The Louvre is one of the world’s most famous Paris attractions, and is one of the top museums in the world. It is home to some of the most famous pieces of art, including Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The Louvre also features the famous glass pyramid famous worldwide.

Basillica of Sacre-Coeur

Not as widely known as the Eiffel tower and the louvre, yet just as picturesqe and stunning. The Basillica of Sacre-Coeur is a beautiful Roman church in Paris that offers an amazing view of Paris. This is a must see for those who love beautiful photo opportunities and impressive churches.

So before any Paris trips are complete, travelers should see these listed Paris attractions.

Hotel Chatter once again had a list of the Best Hotel WiFi. Below is a short summar of their original findings. Check out their story as well.

Marriott Hotel Brands

Residence Inn, Courtyard, and Springhill Suites all do WiFi signals and in room internet access great, unlike their flagship Marriott hotels. For some reason, these hotels are much better at wifi than Marriott hotels.

Holiday Inn Express

Generally, low cost hotels have free, strong WiFi because they are used to offering free services to compete with other low cost hotels. Holiday Inn Express lives up to this reputation and offers great, free WiFi.

JDV Hospitality

This California hotel group has a free, strong, unsecured wireless connection in all of their hotels. They have arguably the easiest wifi access in hotels.

Omni Hotels

Free, strong signals in the lobbies of Omni Hotels sets them apart from other business hotels. In room wifi access still requires a fee though, which can still displease travelers.

Best Western, Wingate Inn, Days Inn, and Hampton Inn

These low cost, standard hotels have been offering free wifi access for awhile recently, making them all great options for travelers not interested in paying an additional internet access fee.

Hotel Chatter has a list of the Worst hotel WiFi in 2007. Below are the wifi hotel losers of this year.

Kor Hotel Group

Eight different, confusing policies that vary on your hotel’s location add to the frustration of travelers who may end up with a WiFi bill for internet access that did not work for them.

Intercontinental Hotels

Inconsistent hotel policy puts Intercontinental hotels on the list. Depending on the hotel, wifi may be free, cost $15 a day, or cost up to $6 an hour. In room ethernet access is also sometimes an extra fee for hotel guests as well, which not many travelers would be very fond of for just checking some email.

Four Seasons Hotels

This famed luxury hotel chain is luxurious in every way except its internet and wifi policy. Depending on your city, WiFi for a day can cost anywhere between $10 and $30. In some cases, high speed ethernet access in your room will cost $10 alone.

Morgans Hotel Group

24 hour use of Morgans wifi will run you $10, which is a pretty ridiculous fee to pile on top of your hotel room which costs upwards of $225/night. How a $225 room charge doesn’t cover the costs of a network administrator is beyond me.

Marriott

The hotels that make up the Marriott brand, Residence Inn, Courtyard, and SpringHill Suites, are all notoriously good at offering strong, free WiFi. However, Marriott brand hotels are most of the time terrible, and/or spendy.

So in conclusion, why do hotels find it necessary to charge a fee for spotty internet access, if all it does is generate bad press? My willingness to pay $250 a night depreciates if the wireless network a) costs $15, and b) doesn’t work. Just stick with some quality, free wifi and travelers will appreciate it.

Be sure to check out the original hotel chatter article on the worst hotel wifi linked above.

Apple MacBook

If you haven’t switched to a MacBook, maybe it is about that time. Apple Macbooks are sleek, small, powerful, secure, and beautiful. They come loaded with all the mac software you need, and they will never short you on power. If you’re still afraid to ditch Windows for Mac OSX, you can dual boot your Macbook with Windows XP or Windows Vista with parallels software.

If you want to purchase a laptop just for traveling, a Macbook would be a perfect fit, since it is stylish, small, and great with multimedia. You can upload photos, edit movies, and browse the internet all with ease while traveling with Macbooks because of their free, secure multimedia software included. Macbooks are probably the best laptops to travel with.

Travel with a Macbook.

Lenovo X60

If you refuse to ditch Microsoft Windows, or just plain cannot because of your work and business, a Lenovo X60 is a high end, ultraportable laptop great for travel. This powerful PC is made for ultra mobile people (travelers) with its great battery life and small design. It receieved CNETs award for best ultraportable laptop because of its power, reliability, and value.

So if you’re a power business user looking to get a solid, ultra portable laptop, consider traveling with Lenovo X60.

Dell E1405

A Dell E1405 offers a more affordable ultra mobile laptop for travelers. The Dell Inspiron E1405 starts at just $700. A barebones, $700 model includes an intel core Duo, 1 GB of ram, 80GB hard drive, cd burner, and all the other standard specifications.

This barebones Dell E1405 Inspiron is plenty to handle a travelers laptop needs while on the road or overseas. So if you are looking to a portable, affordable laptop to substitute for your desktop, the Dell Inspiron E1405 can do the trick for you.

Sony MDR-NC50

Coming in at only about $170, this sony model of noise canceling headphones is a pretty good deal. They offer the Over-the-ear design and have many good features. When you want to cancel noise, just hit the switch on the headphones and enjoy the quiet. They have good sound quality, and are foldable so they can be stored away easily in an accompanying carrying case. I had a chance to test out a friend’s Sony MDR-NC50 headphones, and I enjoyed them very much. They are a quality set of noise canceling headphones. Read the whole review of the Sony MDR-NC50 headphones at CNET.

AKG K 28 NC

This very travel friendly set of noise canceling headphones are small, comfortable, and more portable than other, larger sets of noise canceling headphones. They offer great sound quality, and cost around $130. Because of the small size of headphones, they do have a separate, attached battery pack with a powerswitch that controls the noise canceling capabalities. A complete review of the AKG K 28 NC can be found at CNET.

Bose QuietComfort 2

The Bose Quiet Comfort 2 noise canceling headphones are the cream of the crop when it comes to headphones. Their amazing sound quality and noise canceling capabilities are evident in their price tag: $299.

They run for 35 hours on one AAA battery, and output great sound unblemished by outside sound. They are big and bulky though, and are not very traveler friendly as they take up a lot of space. But if you want the best noise canceling and sound quality, the Bose Quiet Comfort 2 headphones are the ones to get.

Bose QuietComfort2 Review at CNET

Siwash Lake Ranch in British Columbia is a world class resort set on 80,000 acres of uninhabited pristine, Canadian wildnerness. Forests, grasslands, rivers, and lakes make up the large parcel of land this dude ranch is set on.

Among the many activities available at Siwash Lake Dude Ranch, riding is the most popular and best activitiy. If you’re a beginner looking to learn how to ride, Siwash offers lessons and guided rides. However, if you’re an experienced horse rider, they also give you the freedom to go on solitary horse rides by yourself. This flexible riding feature is something the dude ranch prides itself on, and it sets it apart from other ranches that do not allow riders to take out horses alone.

Even though Siwash Lake Ranch is a great place to ride horses, don’t think that is all they offer. Other activities, depending on the season, include

• fishing
• canoeing
• swimming
• nature walking
• bird watching
• wildlife viewing
• dog sledding
• snowshoeing
• cross-country skiing
• ice fishing
• lake skating

These activities give the visitors freedom and choice, as to whether to do them alone or with the help of a guide and outdoor expert.

This luxury dude ranch only accomodates a maximum of twelve guests at a time, making it a personal luxurious retreat. They also can accomodate small private groups and families.

Rates to stay at this luxury dude ranch range from $300 to $450 a person, per night. There is a three night minimum as well, and the ranch only operates between January and February, and May and October. It’s recommended to book your stay early, as it fills up quickly.

If you’re interested in taking a hop across the border to practice your cowboy skills and enjoy the outdoors in luxury, consider visiting Siwash Lake Ranch.

Outside Resources: Siwash Lake Dude Ranch