During the middle decades of the previous century, it was not an unusual practice for some travelers to take slides of their journey and then once back home bore their friends and neighborhoods by inviting them over to see a slide show of their adventures.

I've walked by the Doubletree Metropolitan Hotel in Midtown on Lexington several times, and I always say to myself something like "Kinda wild. Kinda groovy. Très tropicale!" I would prefer to sound like Baudelaire in my head, but the inner soundtrack is more a beatnik patois.

Every year TripAdvisor publishes a list showing the favorite hotels of several million tourists around the world. On the list presenting the Travelers Choice Awards for 2009 three Budapest hotels are mentioned as well.

Bargain hotels

I love Perth, of course, but I would never expect it to become a tourism hotspot, simply because its isolation means it's never really "on the way" to anywhere. But apparently, despite economic doom and gloom around the world - a little bit less so in Perth, still more buoyant from the mining boom - the powers that be reckon the future of Perth looks bright and a heap more hotels are needed.

Want to know what you can expect your room to be like if you check in to one of Tokyo's most famous hotels? Now's your chance to find out!

Sydney's a hustle-bustle city and if you're like me and not always comfortable with that, then you could be interested in a gem of a place I just discovered there. Out in the middle of Sydney Harbour - the side headed inland, going under the bridge by ferry - you can get off the ferry at Cockatoo Island and while you can still see the skyscrapers of Sydney clearly, you get the feeling that you're somewhere quite special.

When I found the Hostel Pegasus on hostelz.com last summer, it seemed like the perfect choice. Affordable dorm room beds in a relatively convenient location of Berlin, effectively ending what had been an otherwise torturous search to find available beds that would not break the bank.

When what's now known as the Rendezvous Observation City Hotel was first built in the 1980s, the people of Perth were up in arms. Until then, the beautiful coastline of Perth had been kept relatively free of development and "Ob City" as it was known to locals was the first high-rise hotel to be approved.

Perth people all know you can buy good cakes from Miss Maud's, the chain of coffee shop/restaurants that are found in most shopping centers, and older Perthites remember Miss Maud herself advertising the food on TV. Fewer people realize there is also the Miss Maud Swedish Hotel in Murray Street, downtown Perth.