The 15 Craziest Hotels Around The World

Not everyone wants the typical room service, continental breakfast, and double bed of a chain hotel.

Whether you still harbor a childhood dream of living in a treehouse, or you love wine so much you'd give anything to sleep inside a giant empty wine barrel, there's a crazy hotel out there that fits your vacation needs. Sometimes, something wacky is called for.

Here are 15 of the world's most eye-popping, weird, and wonderful hotels.

Hotel de Glace, Canada

You don't need to live in an igloo to get the full Canadian experience, but it would probably be fun anyway.

For a few months each year you can experience this sensationalized Eskimo lifestyle in this Québec City hotel, constructed entirely of ice and snow.

Even the bed frames are freezing to the touch here, where 500 tons of ice and 15,000 tons of snow comprise soaring 18-feet ceilings and intricately carved furniture.

Treehotel, Sweden

Having to haul your luggage up to a treetop perch is worth it when the dwelling is as undeniably cool as Sweden's Treehotel.

The vertiginous lodgings float ethereally in the evergreen forest outside of tiny Harads village.

Designed by top Swedish architects to present the ultimate in design innovation, there's a bird's nest suite, an alien UFO suite, and a futuristic cube suite that reflects the trees on all sides from its mirrored walls. Guests ascend to their treetop roosts via ramp, bridge, or electric stairs. The Northern Lights, dogsledding, and snowshoeing tempt in the winter, while summer touts excellent fishing and kayaking.

Karostas Cietums/Karostas Guardhouse, Latvia

This naval port prison closed in 1997 after nearly a century-long run as a dank and dangerous lockup for military prisoners, but it's said to still be haunted by the ghosts of its grim tsarist past.

Spooky Soviet remnants fill the dark, barren metal cells, and actors in military garb recreate the environment of the brig with terrifying realism.

Guests can choose whether to take a tour with "elements of spectacle," engage in a full-on, participatory "reality show" called Behind the Bars, or truly place themselves in a prisoner's shoes by spending a dismal night at the prison, in which they're processed just as prisoners would have been.