Not much but semantics. The hotel industry is moving toward a la carte room cleaning options, and it hardly matters whether we get a discount for opting out of housekeeping or pay a fee for opting in. The bottom line is the same.

There is a great division of opinion on the message boards attached to a recent story on this subject by Roger Wu at USA Today. Most people seem to agree on one thing, though. If hotels give you the option to forego housekeeping services, they should also give you a discount.

Some do. Many others pass off the housekeeping cutbacks as a “green” initiative to spare the environment by cutting back on energy-intensive activities such as washing and vacuuming. There’s less stress on the environment, the hotel saves money and the guest feels virtuous. Everybody wins!

Except the housekeeping staff, of course. The underpaid housekeepers will see their hours and perhaps benefits cut and they’ll end up with much dirtier rooms to clean when a guest checks out after five days without housekeeping.

So when we opt in or out of housekeeping services, let’s keep in mind that the housekeepers will still have to clean the room when we leave. And they still deserve tips.

Starwood Hotels reports that 8.5 percent of its guests choose to forego housekeeping in exchange for a $5 credit to hotel restaurants or 500 points in the loyalty program for each night, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Hotels are promoting this option as ecologically friendly because towels and linens don’t get washed and vacuum cleaners don’t get used. It’s also economically friendly – for the hotel — because housekeepers don’t get paid. The article cites an estimate that it costs a luxury hotel $22 a day to clean a  room.

So I’m not particularly inclined to take the bait on this one. I think I’d rather have the room cleaned and keep the housekeepers employed.

I also can’t help wondering how long it will be before this option becomes a perk and hotels start charging a cleaning fee.

The Boeing 737, which Southwest calls  its “green plane,”  is 520 pounds lighter than the airline’s standard jet. It doesn’t sound like much — the equivalent of just a few hefty passengers — but it will save 10,000 gallons of fuel a year, and cause a corresponding drop in carbon emissions, Southwest CEO Gary Kelly announced at the airline’s Media Day in Dallas.

Southwest Airlines is flying a jet refurbished with lightweight, recycled cabin materials to Seattle today.

The Boeing 737, which Southwest calls  its “green plane,”  is 520 pounds lighter than the airline’s standard jet. It doesn’t sound like much — the equivalent of just a few hefty passengers — but it will save 10,000 gallons of fuel a year, and cause a corresponding drop in carbon emissions, Southwest CEO Gary Kelly announced at the airline’s Media Day in Dallas.

The materials, including lighter carpets and seat components, are also recycled and environmentally friendly. Southwest has also introduced new coffee, in paper cups replacing environmentally unfriendly Styrofoam.

Southwest is also reconfirming its emphasis on RNP — required navigation performance — a form of precision navigation that saves fuel and money while reducing carbon emissions. The company says it will spend $175 million to equip its entire fleet and train all its pilots for RNP.

The whale was pinned to the ship when it docked in Vancouver last month.

A juvenile fin whale was found dead last week on the bow of a cargo ship in the Port of Tacoma. Biologists believe that whale was killed by a collision with a ship, although possibly not the one it was found on, the News Tribune of Tacoma reported.

In January, Royal Caribbean’s Radiance of the Seas arrived at Puerto Montt, Chile, with a whale’s decomposed carcass caught in the prow. Biologists later said the whale was dead when the ship hit it.

Bixi bike station, Old Montreal.

Montreal has a cool new public bike rental service, but be very certain you understand the fees before you use it.

It would be very easy to believe from reading the explanation at the automated Bixi bike rental stations that $5 buys unlimited access to the bikes for 24 hours, with the first 30 minutes entirely free. In fact, many people have interpreted the information provided at the stations in just that way and have complained online about getting much higher charges on their credit card statements.

Here’s how it actually works: You pay $5 for 24 hours of access, which allows you to take any bike from any rental station and return it to any other. As long as you do that within 30 minutes on each trip, there’s no additional charge. You can take multiple rides of less than 30 minutes, with at least 5 minutes between them, within that 24-hour period. But if you keep a bike longer, the fees start to add up: $1.50 for the first additional half hour, $3 for the next, and $6 per half-hour thereafter.

The rationale for this fee structure is that the bikes are intended to provide an environmentally sensitive alternative to cars and taxis for short trips, and are not meant for all-day touring. But the city of Montreal could go a long way toward making that clear to visitors.

With a full understanding of how the fees work, the bikes can be a lot of fun. These are not racing bikes — they’re sturdy three-speeds with baskets on the handlebars. There are 3,000 bikes available at 300 stations throughout the city; another 2,000 bikes are scheduled to be added at 100 stations next month.

The instructions on how to pay for, extract and remove the bikes are clear at the stations, even if the fees are not. You can even check the Bixi Web site to see how many bikes are available, in real time, at each station.

Stay to the right in Montreal’s bike lanes because the locals will be whizzing past you at high speed. If the bike lanes along boulevards Maisonneuve and Rene Levesque are too intense for you, head to the more relaxed bike paths on the waterfront in Old Montreal.

There are no helmets available for rental, which has caused a bit of controversy. It would be a very good idea to bring your own.

My husband and I took Bixi bikes across town to lunch and then out onto the Jacques Cartier Bridge. We had a terrific time, and ended up paying $18US each for roughly three and a half hours, total. Not bad, but we would have broken up the rides differently had we understood the fee structure better.

A full explanation of the fees is available online. You can read it at the stations, but only if you squint through several pages of information on a small screen in tiny type through the sun glare. I can’t imagine the reason for not posting a simple breakdown of the fees in readable type on a regular sign at each station, unless the goal is to deceive people. The city should fix that.

Despite this complaint, Montreal’s Bixi bikes are regarded as a big success, and other cities are considering similar programs. I just hope they’re more transparent about the charges.

Doña Margarita is 81 years old. She makes the best tortillas on Earth.

The people of Costa Rica live the longest, happiest, most ecologically sustainable lives on the planet, according to the Happy Planet Index formulated by a British research group, CNN reports.

The index doesn’t rank the happiest places on Earth, exactly. It combines the self-reported life satisfaction of a nation’s population with its ecological footprint and life expectancy to rate “the relative efficiency with which nations convert the planet’s natural resources into long and happy lives for their citizens.”

I’ve been to Costa Rica many times, starting in the early 1990s, when my parents served in the Peace Corps there.  And I’m not surprised it came out on top. (The Dominican Republic came in second, and Latin America scored well, generally.)

(See my Costa Rica photo gallery.)

It’s a lovely country of beaches, rain forests and tropical dry forest in Central America (no, it’s not an island) between Nicaragua and Panama. It has the highest standard of living in the region and a serious commitment to the social welfare of its people. It abolished its army and has enjoyed a stable democracy for the past 60 years. 

Families tend to be closely knit, children are valued, literacy rates are high and health care is universal. The country’s stability has attracted tourists and foreign investors, but the government has resisted some open-market reforms, such as privatizing utilities, that it considers harmful to its citizens.

Over the past decade or so, the country has aggressively developed alternate energy sources, including wind power and geothermal power. It has also erased some of its foreign debt in pioneering debt-for-nature swaps that preserve tropical forests.

Certainly, there are problems. The country struggles with illegal immigration, property crime and government corruption. But on balance, Costa Ricans seem a pretty relaxed bunch. As they say, “Pura vida.”

Alper Çuğun / http://alper.nl

I recently spent $1,500 on new brakes and tires for my Subaru, which refloated the fantasy I have long held under the surface reality of my suburban existence, the dream of life without a car.

In that life, I would ride a bike and trains. Also trolley cars, subways and buses. Maybe a scooter.

Today I’m nurturing that dream at the Connecticut Train Day symposium at Union Station in New Haven, where the topic is bicycling and commuter rail. Rail*Trains*Ecology*Cycling arranged the event, and provided some really good coffee.

Norman Garrick, director of the Center for Transportation and Urban Planning at the University of Connecticut, raised a lot of interesting ideas in an excellent slideshow:

• If you want to see bicycles and trains working together, go to Amsterdam.
• Portland, one of the first U.S. cities to bring back light rail, is thriving and its mass transit system is growing — along with bicycle use.
• For bikes to become part of the mass transit system, they have to become more familiar to the masses. People who don’t look great in Spandex need to feel comfortable on bikes.
• Our transportation system should be about access, not mobility. We want access to our jobs, our friends and our families, and we can have that without traveling endless miles if we sustain “vibrant, viable urban places.”

Think about it.