Gadling

Those of you who cruise through your bookmarks and RSS feeds religiously every day are in for a surprise when you reach Frommers.com. The travel site just relaunched it's site, featuring an all new frontpage, reengineered for the web savvy reader of 2009. Our insider at Frommers, David Lytle, explains it as follows:

"We gave the site a facelift to make it even more visually appealing. The most significant change can be seen in our wider pages that allow us to accommodate large striking images and widgets that help us contextualize our content further. We didn't mess with what already works on Frommers.com – lots and lots of in-depth current content to help travelers plan their trips, from our authors and our own savvy readers."

And striking it is. The landing carousel of five, sweeping images now dominates the frontpage, and now you can directly and easily link to popular facets from Arthur Frommer's personal blog to the volumes of information all stored within the pages of Frommers.com.

Don't forget to stop by the Behind the Guides blog while you're at it, where you can pick up dispatches from all of our favorie guidebook editors.

Vacation lodging in Honduras is as varied as its landscape. One can splurge at a five star luxury hotel in the city, share bunks at a hostel in Utila or rent a cabana on the beach in Roatan. Each accommodation offers a different angle of Honduras highlighting a different experience. With the jungle close at hand, however, tourists are afforded a unique experience: they can stay in an eco lodge.

Halfway between living in luxury and roughing it in the jungle, eco lodges are the perfect way to experience the natural beauty of Honduras. Each green property is tailored around the landscape, immersing the visitor in the ecosystem and bonding them with nature.

Obviously this varies from property to property. Some lodges transplant standard, western rooms into the forest with air conditioning, dry wall and luxe amenities. In this sense, the term eco lodge is applied fairly loosely. Other lodges, however, use the bedroom to channel the energy of the lodge, from using aspects from the surrounding environment and culture to building the entire lodge in traditional Honduran architecture.

The Honduran Champa, like that at the Villas Pico Bonito is an excellent way to experience an eco lodge and immerse yourself in the Honduran jungle. Inside of the massive structure is a mixture of traditional and modern, with two bedrooms, bathrooms and a full outdoor kitchen with bar. Each bedroom is technically exposed to the outdoors, with traditional walls rising partially to the roof and open to the jungle temperature, sounds and bugs. To keep nature out, you sleep under a mosquito net and a ceiling fan.

Gallery: Honduras Eco Lodges

July is hotel month at Gadling, four magnificent weeks of covering all things hotel all over the planet. We'll be bringing you all sorts of juicy updates from the newest and best properties on the market, from the El San Juan in Puerto Rico to to the new Elements hotels by Starwood to the wild and wonderful Skybar at the Mondrian Los Angeles.

We'll also be inviting you into the frequent travelers circle, giving you the inside info on how to score the best hotel deals, maximize earned points and make the most out of your business trip when you've had a room paid for you.

The best part? We're capping off the four weeks with a couple of exciting giveaways to get your hotel appetite satiated. We can't give you the entire details right now, but you can bet that it involves free nights at your favorite hotel chain!

Scrumptious. Stay tuned all month for a tour throught the best properties and tips from you friends at Gadling -- you can see all the updates at www.gadling.com/tag/hotelmonth.

Bookmark it now!

I find myself slightly unsettled about my upcoming travel to Dakar, Senegal this Tuesday, partially because the tourism office in New York wont pick up the phone and partially because Dakar is rock bottom on the Economist's recent liveability survey.

Yet as our tweeters and my archaeologist friend Cameron assure me, Dakar is a magnificent place. This photo, shot by cfarivar on the island of Goree just off the coast of Dakar tends to reassure me. Despite having the knowledge that Goree was a former slave trading hub, the colors, architecture and history of the region seem most endearing, a trait that any traveler can grow warm to. I'll let you know how the trip goes...

Think you've got what it takes to submit to the Photo of the Day series? Add your photo to the Gadling Pool on Flickr and we might use it down the road. Make sure you save them under Creative Commons though, otherwise we can't use them!

If you're in the tourist frame of mind when planning your trip to Honduras, three regions are going to come forth as possible locations to visit: The Bay Islands, The Northern Coast and Copan. Each destination serves a special purpose, each a varied look into the prism of Honduras. Let's take a gander through each area and highlight the benefits – if you're quick enough you can visit all three in a week long trip.

The Bay Islands (above)

Lauded as one of the best diving destinations in the Caribbean sea, Roatan, Utila and Guanaja make up the three largest and most popular Bay Islands north of Honduras. It's a great place to book a beach cabana, kick back and enjoy the relaxing Caribbean atmosphere, even if you're not going to go in the water. The West End and West Bay regions of Roatan are a bit more developed than areas on the other two islands, with multi million dollar resorts spotting the beach, higher prices and a few trendy boutiques. Utila caters to more of a backpacking crowd, while Guanaja, the smallest of the three, is further off the beaten path.

One can fly to Roatan directly from the United States and the two largest islands can also be reached from the mainland of Honduras via either ferry or aircraft. Check out the Hidden in Honduras logistics post for more details on that.

Honduras usually isn't the first place that people think of when they think of vacationing in Central America. Big players in the market like Costa Rica, Cancun and Cozumel consume the majority of the market, while many think that other countries in the region are unsafe or unstable.

It's true that Central America hasn't got the best record for safety in the world -- the government of Honduras was just removed by a military coup, Guatemala's civil war rocked the nineties, and the entire region is a hotspot for drug trade. These instances are in specifc pockets though, and while some areas throughout Central America are rough, it's by no means a reason to avoid any particular country.

Taking advantage of some remarkable recent airfares from the United States to San Pedo Sula, the second largest city in Honduras, Gadling had the pleasure of taking a quick tour through the country, reveling in the dense jungles, immaculate beaches and local culture.

The result? A perfectly safe, fascinating trip to a Central American country rich in culture, underpopulated with tourists and quite the bargain for savvy travelers. Stick around while we take you on a quick tour through the magnificent country this week, in our microseries called Harnessing Honduras. It could just be your next alternative to Costa Rica.

In Boston's Logan international airport, I recently witnessed a meltdown in the security line. A first class passenger was livid -- furious because ordinary passengers were being directed into the shorter, elite x-ray lane by the TSA. For their part, the TSA were indifferent. All passengers are the same, they kept saying, as people shuffled past the ID checkpoint while the first class passenger stewed as he watched his x-ray line double in size.

That's what first class passengers pay for though, right? Some airports have specific elite lanes, where depending on your paid fare or your elite status you can enjoy a enjoy a shorter wait at the checkpoint. Given the the absurd amounts of money and time that they devote to the airline, shouldn't they be rewarded with faster passage?

Or, should first class privileges not apply to the security line? In a way, a shorter line at the ID check effectively lets these passengers cut in front of those that aren't "elite." That seems to be what these particular TSA agents were thinking -- if they had their way, everyone would be in the same line and file through en masse.

What's your take?

Oft voted among the worst airports in the world, Charles De Gaulle outside of Paris doesn't have a great reputation among travelers. The terminals are disjointed, sprawling and confusing, public transportation is mind boggling and security is amazingly frustrating.

With enough practice and preparation, however, the beast can be tamed. Connected to the heart of Paris by regional RER trains, it takes about one hour to get from terminal to city center, so it's very possible to get in some quick sightseeing during a long layover.

With CDG, the keys are in managing security and the train station to minimize time wasted in transit. Stick around for a few tips from the experts and to learn how to take advantage of your next layover in Paris.

Today's Photo of the Day comes from our very own Stephen Greenwood, our newest blogger and resident Hong Kong expert. He'll be blogging from southeast asia for the next few months in his series Dim Sum Dialogues, absorbing the culture and taking us on a journey through the massive city state. In case you hadn't figured, he's a damn good photographer too.

Think you've got what it takes to submit to the Photo of the Day series? Add them to the Gadling Pool on Flickr and we might use it down the road. Make sure you save them under Creative Commons though, otherwise we can't use them!

OpenSkies, the all-business-class subsidiary of British Airways has always been fighting an uphill battle. At only one year old, the airline has always struggled to earn and maintain a customer base. Now with demand on the wane and airlines cutting back, OpenSkies might soon be on the chopping block.

The model, it seemed, was valid. A smaller plane with all business and first class seats could consume less fuel, sell fewer seats at a slightly higher price and still make a profit. But as Eos, Silverjet and Maxjet all showed, there just might not be enough demand for business class seats to warrant an entire widebody aircraft full of them.

Now, with British Airways launching business-class service between London (LCY) and New York on a tiny A318 aircraft, the niche crowd may move to that product. That leaves very little space for OpenSkies. According to The Guardian, this means that BA may want to sell of or cancel the service.

No official word has come from the BA, naturally, so the airline may survive yet. Having personally flown the service a few times, I hope they make it. But in a market as tight as this, the top of the hill is a long way off.