There’s a rather acidic email exchange going on between a one Julie Kobayashi and the famed Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. Ms. Kobayashi claims that the Stanley gave her, her fiancé, and their home a rash of bedbugs, which has in turn racked up cleaning and replacement fees in the thousands of dollars. The Stanley—inspiration for Stephen King’s The Shining, incidentally—maintains that they did not, in fact, send Ms. Kobayashi home with any sort of infestation. Read on for the war of words.

Finding an honest review of hotel can sometimes be tough. The best recommendations tend to be from people you know and trust, but those people don’t usually have the skinny on every hotel around the country or the world. So far, TripAdvisor tends to showcase the most unbiased reviews, but those reviews vacillate in quality and focus, and to read the reviews for some hotels is like reading a schizophrenics diary—the hotel is amazing, no the hotel is horrible, no the hotel was just OK. And as we mentioned before, the reviews aren’t vetted for legitimacy, so it’s a bit of a crapshoot. Enter Oyster Hotel Reviews, an upgraded version of TripAdvisor.

Via HotelChatter, one of those cheeky pro sports stories about the quirkiness of professional athletes dropped today on a local Milwaukee ABC affiliate: Baseball players are claiming (and have been claiming) that Milwaukee’s famed Pfister Hotel is haunted. And some of the human gene pool’s finest specimen are legitimately scared of it, like the girly-men they are. But the more important question: Can ghosts affect a sports team’s win-loss record?

The Peninsula in Beverly Hills is creating the perfect opportunity to schmooze and clink glasses with other LA royalty this summer. Every Thursday through Labor Day, the hotel is opening its Roof Garden bar to everyone, even those not staying there.

Bars are expensive. And people are broke. So it’s no wonder in-room service is on the rise these days, with nearly 77% of travelers taking advantage of in-room selections once during their stay. With that in mind, some forward-thinking hotels in cities around the US have amped up an oft-dismissed amenity to keep their guests from straying and spending shiny nickels elsewhere. To keep you and yours in-situ and in-ebriated, these sharp crash pads are offering beefed-up luxury versions of their mini bar. We’ll call it the not-so-mini bar. You’ll call it your little in-room drinking buddy. Check out a few examples of the haute mini bar done right.

Russian billionaire Telman Ismailov is thumbing his nose at the very idea of a recession happening anywhere in the world. He’s so confident in the oodles of money that must be floating around somewhere, he’s pushing forward with the opening of his hotel, located on the Turkish Riviera. This $1.4 billion property (built with TI’s own money, natch) will have the honor of being the most expensive hotel in Europe (take that Hotel Martinez!). The Mardan Palace was inspired by the Ottoman empire and modeled after the Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul.

A Reuters poll recently revealed what travelers want from their hotel stays. And hotels around the world, you should listen up: Almost half (47%) of those surveyed said that they choose hotels based on the technology amenities. Ten percent of the participants cared about how “green” the hotel was, and one-third of the surveyees cared about the toiletries. Underscoring the wifi factor, 33 percent of those polled said they chose their hotels based on the hotels’ website, and 17 percent utilized some kind of review websites to book hotels.

Joie de Vivre Hotels is ramping up for a fabulous contest, where the winner takes all with two free nights at each and every one of the chain’s 35 properties, all located conveniently in California. Each of the 25 grand prize winners will get a cute little “passport,” giving access to the hotels up and down the coast. There are no blackout dates, and as a little bonus, the hotel rooms are transferable to friends and family, though the deal expires in two years.

Forget the Hamptons this summer, cheap though they may be. Just head to Spain, where you can rent an entire castle at bargain basement prices. Last summer, this 11th-century Catalonian castle (just minutes from Costa Brava) went for an impressive $11,000 a week. This summer, even during the peak months of July and August, it’ll only run you $5,800 a week.

Whether you’re planning your first SXSW pilgrimage or simply escaping the Wall Street collapse, you’re obviously in need of that perfect Austin crash pad. Nothing too pretentious, nothing too shoddy. Well, South Austin’s Hotel San Jose might just be where it’s at. After literally driving past the place three times (it likely would have required three or four more passes, had I not called the front desk-jockey for some help), my relationship with the San Jose certainly got off to a sticky start. Expecting some sort of structure that actually resembled a “hotel,” I was more than a bit bummed out when I finally pulled into the lot of what seemed to be little more than a ramshackle motel. I suppose, had I done my homework prior to making my reservation, this would have been a non-issue; but needless to say, the curb appeal was less than stellar.