It is the same thing when I book on Air Canada or rent a car from Hertz. I get told what the anticipated charges will be.

I hate resort fees, but they need to disclose them at the time of reservation. If they don’t, then they should not be paid.
A Virginia based company had a conference recently at the Gaylord in Washington, DC. The Gaylord disclosed a “resort fee”. I didn’t go to the conference! I went to it last year, but if they are going to have it at “resort fee” hotels, they can go get stuffed.

Another point – hotels have probably come to realize that they don’t have a chance of getting many customers to pay the ridiculous $15/day high speed internet fee. That is probably one of the reasons they are trying to bundle it and make it mandatory.

Take your business elsewhere. If it’s fully disclosed and you still choose to stay at that property, then you have agreed to pay the resort fee.

The Credit Card company doesn’t absorb the cost of the dispute. The chargeback is just that, a chargeback. The vendor that processed the charges initially will have the funds deducted from their account. You can’t think that Mastercard or Visa would set-up a system that would allow all disputes to be at handled at their cost. If this was the case, the merchant would have no incentive to respond to a chargeback.

So, Treasure Island probably didn’t respond to Amex because they knew they would lose. If they are as greedy as AA, they can still send the matter to a collection agency and it’s up to you to challenge the original invoice. Providing documentation that Amex ruled in your favor will not satisfy a collection agency. Then again, Treasure Island might have better things to do.

The more challenging you can make this request, the more likely the supplier will just write it off (fail to respond). For example if you booked a hotel on the web and get hit with a resort fee, tell them you want an exact copy of the pages you viewed as they were at the time you viewed them, and with the disclosure highlighted. Few companies can do this; either they will ignore it (you win), or send you a copy of the *current* web pages; if they do the latter then you can compare the confirmation page to the one that you (hopefully) printed at the time you made the booking – it will almost certainly be different, which means you can tell the credit card company that the supplier did not comply with your request for documentation, and that the documentation they provided doesn’t support their claim.

If your request is reasonably necessary to support your claim that you weren’t told about the fee, and the merchant doesn’t provide the info, the credit card company pretty much has to take your side.

Using this approach I have never lost a dispute, and have won probably 8-10 of them over the years. I’m going to guess that in some cases the disclosures WERE made and I just missed them, but no one yet found it worthwhile to actually prove it.