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A ‘total price’ precedent

August 3, 2006

The law is finally catching up to hotels that add surprise surcharges to their guests’ bills. Wyndham has announced it will quote an all-inclusive price for its hotel rooms nationwide, after agreeing to a $2.3 million settlement with Florida’s state attorney general.

The state began investigating Wyndham in 2001, when “automatic” hotel charges, such as resort fees, resort tariffs, energy surcharges and parking/transportation fees appeared on several state employee travel vouchers.

The settlement also requires online travel agencies that sell Wyndham rooms, such as Orbitz or Travelocity, disclose the automatic hotel charges to consumers at the time of reservation. If they don’t, Wyndham has to stop doing business with them.

Wyndham is also paying $560,000 to affected consumers who unknowingly had to pay the automatic charges.

Folks, this is a precedent if I’ve ever seen one. If the other major hotel chains don’t follow suit soon, they may face similar investigations and have to pay millions in penalties.

It would not surprise me at all to see some of the larger hotel chains introduce “one price” initiatives, that are touted as “customer friendly” but are, in fact, meant to prevent Florida and other states from taking them to court.

Stay tuned.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

1 comment

  • http://BangkokAtoZ.com MekhongKurt

    I didn’t know about this until just now (early March, 2008), but it’s great to learn that such deceptive practices got shut down.

    When the budget air carriers began springing up here in Thailand and elsewhere in the region, they quickly gained notoriety for their print ads for ridiculously low fares that, judging by the ads, were for real.

    They weren’t.

    When you actually went to *buy* a ticket, after all the surcharges, the actual fare was anywhere in the 4-7 times as much as advertised range.

    To be fair, they now are much more open about those charges in their ads, though they do have that info in tiny, tiny print.

    BTW, having the ad in hand can help. A friend of mine needed to make an unexpected trip from Bangkok to Penang (Malaysia), with a night departure from Bangkok. The morning of his departure, he saw an ad for a ticket that fully disclosed the surcharges, and it was still a heck of a bargain compared to those on other carriers. So, off he went to one of the airline’s offices to buy a ticket — where he was told the fare had since gone up by something like US$30.00. He had newspaper in hand, and slapped it on the counter, pointing to the ad — and the date, rightly asking why they hadn’t changed the ad if the fare went up a week before, as they claimed?

    He got the ticket — at the advertised price.

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