If you’re a big fan of London, you’ll love this virtual aerial tour of London. It features many of the main attractions such as Tower Bridge, the Dome and Regent’s Park and allows you to pan and zoom in any direction.

[ Visit London Aerial Virtual Tour ]

Online hotel review service Oyster features a Photo Fakeout category in their blog that gives a reality check to hotel reviews, pitting a hotel’s promotional images with actual photographs.

The only disappointing thing about Oyster’s Photo Fakeouts is that there aren’t more of them—and that this isn’t the dedicated feature of any site we can find. Popular travel planning and review site TripAdvisor allows for user-submitted photo uploads, which are nice, and I’ve sometimes had good luck searching Flickr for the name of hotels, but it’d be great to see something like these Photo Fakeouts in an easily searchable database.

As weblog Of Zen and Computer points out, it’s worth noting that pictures can be manipulated to look bad in much the same way as they can to look good. That said, sometimes the difference is clear and egregious, and it’s nice to get a reality check before you book.

If you’ve got your own methods for searching out the reality of your hotel before you book, let’s hear your tips in the comments.

[ Visit Photo Fakeout ]

A hotel building leans before falling in a heavily flooded river after Typhoon Morakot hit Taitung county, Taiwan, Sunday, Aug. 9, 2009. The six-story hotel collapsed and plunged into the river Sunday morning after floodwaters eroded its base – all 300 people in the hotel had been evacuated and uninjured.

Tired of wondering when your checked bag is going to show up in baggage claim? One company thinks it has the answer–and it involves your iPhone.

Bag-Claim, which costs $4.99, is an iPhone app that works with a wireless Bluetooth speaker. The app acts like a sonar system and lets the user know when the bag is within 75 feet–and then updates further with visual and vibrating alerts until the bag is safely in their hands.

The company doesn’t recommend any one speaker in particular, but points out that they range in price from $25 to $110 and often last hundreds of hours in standby mode. The problem? Many of them have pulsing LEDs that indicate Bluetooth is active–which is something I’m sure TSA employees will just love. “Oh, don’t mind that flashing light on my bag, it’s nothing.”

Bag-Claim costs $4.99 (for the app only) and is available now in the App Store.