Resort fees. Mandatory tips. Concierge surcharges.
If you’ve stayed at a hotel in the last few years, you’ve become accustomed — if not anesthetized — to these annoying extras. You expect them. You’re indifferent to them when they appear on your bill.
You shouldn’t be.
Consider these two facts: 2010 is shaping up to be another “down” year for the hotel industry. PKF Consulting forecasts that hotel occupancy will remain flat compared with 2009 and room rates will slide 1.5 percent. That means it’s a buyer’s market — actually, make that a beggar’s market — with hotels practically giving away their rooms.
At a time like this, no hotel manager in his right mind would add a new surcharge. If anything, they’d remove them to make us happy. “Upsetting guests is not worth it,” says Robert Mandelbaum, a PKF analyst.
All of which raises the following questions: Which hotel fees are still out there that shouldn’t be? Which ones should be euthanized? And how do you go about finishing them off?
Here are five hotel fees that must die.
Resort fees
These add-ons to your room bill started innocently enough. Resort guests complained that they were being nickel-and-dimed by extras for beach towels, umbrellas and the use of exercise facilities, among other things. So the properties rolled them all into a “resort fee” and made those amenities “free.” But along the way, the fee got horribly twisted by greed. First it became mandatory, so you no longer had a choice about using the amenities, or, more specifically, being charged for them. And then larger, urban hotels that didn’t have resort-like amenities, decided to copy it. Before long, resort fees had become an embarrassment to the hotel industry. Guests were being hit with the fees everywhere, causing their room charges to mushroom by $15, $20 or even $30 a night. Unacceptable. It’s time to give resort fees the heave-ho!
How to kill them: No hotel should charge a mandatory resort fee. Ever. If you book a room at a hotel that has one, and it’s clearly disclosed, you have few options. Trying to negotiate your way out of one when you check in is your best bet. However, few resort fees are adequately disclosed. If the hotel refuses to strike the surcharge from your bill, talk to your credit card company. I’ve dealt with several cases in which the fee was refunded directly by a credit card company.
Fees for furniture
The most common flavor of this fee is a surcharge for your safe. (Ironically, the hotel often doesn’t vouch for the safety of the items you store in one.) But that’s not the only item hotels ask you to pay extra for. Corinne McDermott, who runs a Web site about family travel, asked to be put in a room with a refrigerator on a recent visit to Quebec City. The hotel asked for an additional $10-a-day-fee. She said “no.” “We made room in the minibar and managed to fit our daughter’s milk and other snacks inside,” she says. “And we paid extra attention to the check-out receipt, to make sure there were no additional charges.” Billing a guest for furniture that’s already in the room is unconscionable. What’s next, a fee for your bed?
How to kill them: Always ask if there’s an additional fee when you make a special request, like a room with a refrigerator or any other amenity, such as a coffeemaker. (Don’t laugh — I’ve come across hotel guests who were charged extra for their coffeemakers.) If the answer is yes, you can always decline. If you find yourself staring down one of these surcharges at check-out, you should protest — first to the front-desk employee, then to a manager, and finally to your credit-card company.
Concierge, bellhop and housecleaning fees
Believe it or not, some hotels tack on a fee for their bellhops and concierges — two optional services that guests usually pay for with tips. At one hotel, motivational speaker Barry Maher was hit with a mandatory fee for bellhop service. “Never mind the fact that I rolled my own rollerbag to the room and never even saw a bellman,” he says. He also found a fee for housecleaning on his final bill. “Mentioning that I write and speak on customer service got the first fee removed,” he recalls. “But I think I just shrugged and shook my head over the housekeeping fee.” A lot of other hotel guests, do too. What if you don’t pay a fee for cleaning the room? Will they refuse to service your room? Come on.
How to kill them: Common sense is your most effective weapon against these unreasonable fees. Not only are they often improperly disclosed, but they also fly in the face of reason. The cost of your room should include housekeeping. Use of a concierge or bellhop should be optional, not mandatory. Explain to a manager that if they ever want your business again, the fees must be removed. Immediately.
Way-out-there fees
Never underestimate a hotel revenue manager’s creativity. Seriously, these employees sit around all day wondering how to make more money from us. George Webb, a blogger who has been traveling the world, recently encountered an “air conditioning fee” at an airport hotel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. “You paid for it by the hour,” he remembers. “Plus, there was even a service charge and taxes on that fee, in addition to another service charge and tax on the price of the room.” Fees like this shouldn’t exist, and the only reason they do is that guests put up with them. Look, do you really think visitors will tolerate an un-air conditioned room at an airport hotel in Kuala Lumpur? Neither do I. These fees must die.
How to kill them: Logic. Some of these fees are so laughable that you just have to ask about them in order to have them removed.
Fees that ought to be illegal
Leslie Dykeman stayed at a Comfort Inn in Scottsdale, Ariz., and an Econo Lodge in Tempe, Ariz., recently. Both charged a $3 per day “energy fee.” “Mind you, I am from the northeast,” Dykeman added, “and in Scottsdale, I didn’t turn on the air conditioner once.” Some chain hotels were sued several years ago for adding energy fees to their bills, and backed down. But smaller, franchise properties still do it and get away with it. Surcharges like this ought to be illegal, and in some states they practically are. Adding $3 for electricity is outrageous. If these fees are allowed to stand, it can’t be long before we’re charged for pillows, blankets and toilet paper. Enough already.
How to kill them: Like many other nuisance fees, these kinds of surcharges are poorly disclosed. (And for good reason. They work better when they’re sprung on guests.) Given the surprise nature of these bizarre charges, negotiating them off your bill shouldn’t be too difficult.
Point is, at a time like this, you shouldn’t have to put up with any of these fees. A property charging mandatory resort fees, valet fees, safe fees or energy fees doesn’t just hate its customers — it probably also has a death wish.
(Photo: minasodaboy/Flickr Creative Commons)
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{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
Reminds me of the USA Today fee t hat some hotels charge automatically unless you tell the front desk you don’t want it.
One of the Las Vegas Casinos (which shall remain nameless) also charges a $7 phone fee which you need to tell them to take off if you don’t use their phone.
@Steve Surjaputra
Please NAME the hotel that charges a $7.00 phone fee so I can know not to ever stay there.
Why the anonymity?
Classic bait and switch. Pull you in with low room fees and then add on with the all the extra options. Even if the price is higher I think the consumer would feel less indignant than paying and then seeing all these extra little charges that add up to a lot.
The fact that the hotel industry is in a slump (combined with the fact that consumers can easily comparison shop hotel prices via the internet) is actually the cause of these fees. Because of the recession, hotels are having to compete on price, and so they all want to advertise a low per-room price on their internet sites. But they want to recoup what they can via fees. It’s much like the reason for baggage fees by the airlines.
The best way to kill fees like these is by choosing hotels that don’t charge them, if you can. As far as fees that “ought to be illegal”, well, I’m not a fan of adding more laws to fix a problem that consumers can fix themselves by keeping informed via informative posts on the internet — like yours ;-)
I also find it frustrating that hotels are more expensive to begin with have more fees than the discount shops. Why can’t you just tell me how much it’s going to be and move on?
Another fee I would like to add to the list is WiFi. No hotel should charge for it. Especially not the >$200/night kind. It is so in expensive that even Greyhounds buses offer it for free. Cf. http://nhelke.tumblr.com/post/376461636/wifi-should-be-free
@EricR
Well, with the litigous stuff that’s happening lately, I wasn’t sure. But anyway, it’s the Luxor. It’s actually part of their $12.95 resort fee.
http://www.vegas.com/resorts/luxor/
I’m guessing the “mandatory bellhop fee” is NYC. That fee has been around for a while at hotel where the bellhops are unionized. It used to be about $3 per person and I can’t remember if that was per day or not. I never use bellhops, unless I’m staying in NYC when it’s already paid for.
1. LOGIC???? From a hotel???? oh, you are an optimist……
2. Next, let’s take a shot at insane rental car charges. I rented a car at LAX this week, 2 days @ $39.60 = $79.20 + $36.88 in fees, taxes, CFC, VLF etc…. = $116.08. 1/3 of the bill was fees & taxes……
The only way these fees are going to go away is 1) people stop patronizing establishments that charge them, and 2) when you choose to not patronize such an establishment, call or write them and tell them you gave your business to a competitor that didn’t charge the fees. If enough people do this, they’ll get the message eventually.
“The cost of your room should include housekeeping. Use of a concierge or bellhop should be optional, not mandatory. Explain to a manager that if they ever want your business again, the fees must be removed. Immediately.”
–Obviously, they have to clean the room before I check in, and I agree that that fee should be included in the room rate. But I would be very happy if I did not have to pay for daily housekeeping when I stay in a room for several days. I don’t vacuum and dust my apartment on a daily basis; why do I have to pay a hotel to do that for my room, if I don’t want to. In short, I would LOVE the housekeeping fees to be more a la carte.
A recent Starwood initiative may start signaling the unbundling of housekeeping services for hotels. Guest may choose to receive a $5 hotel credit or 5,000 star points per day (for up to 3 consecutive days) if they decline to have their room cleaned.
It is being positioned as a “Green” initiative, but realistically, the only material green that is saved is labor cost for the hotel operator. Sheets and towels do not need to be washed daily – that can represent a legitimate saving of water & gas/electricity. However, aside from the electricity associated with vacuuming and perhaps room lighting, (or if you want to count the CO2 exhaled by the housekeeper…) there is not much in the way of negative environmental impact.
As labor costs represent the by far the greatest expense for a hotel guest room operating budget. It would be logical to assume that a natural extension of this policy would be to initially discount the hotel rate for a room without housekeeping services, and then offer housekeeping as an optional upgrade for a fee. The hotel would then also be able to quote a lower base retail price (which is the underlying objective behind all these fees.)
Like with air travel, all these clever pricing tricks ultimately lead to an undermining of the consumer value proposition and an unraveling of the traditional service delivery system. Deconstruction of pricing helps commoditize products and rarely works to drive incremental profit unless the product offering is dramatically enhanced or efficiently differentiated.
I hope hotels don’t follow airlines down the path of touting record incremental fee revenues that are trading dollars with base fares that reflect stagnant/falling revenue per seat mile.
Here is the link to the WSJ article: http://j.mp/9pJhoJ
So if the hotel is going to charge a housekeeping fee then tell them you don’t want housekeeping, go without it, you don’t need your bed made for a stay of up to a week, nor do you need clean towels, you don’t have clean towels daily at home so why at a hotel. Tell them to knock off the charge, you go without. Questions should be asked at time of check-in as to what fees are going to be charged to your hotel bill in addition to the nightly room rate. Travelers must get more aggressive with these charges and stop them when checking in not when checking out.
I agree with all of your points but the air-conditioning fee, believe it or not. The airport hotel that you refer to is the Tune Hotel in the KL Low Cost Carrier Terminal. It’s owned by Air Asia which is Asia’s biggest low cost carrier. Tune Hotels is a chain of budget hotels which proudly employs a strategy of pay only for the services you need in order to offer the most value for your money. Their rooms cost $18.
Like low cost carriers, you can love them or hate them but it turns out there is a large segment of travelers who, given the choice, want to pay the lowest dollar to get from point A to point B even if they have to put up with ultra bare bones amenities. The same seems to be true for a certain segment of hotel travelers.
Believe it or not there are many travelers in Southeast Asia who don’t like using air conditioning (ironically it’s usually westerners who espouse this idea).
For more mid- and upmarket hotels, it would be of course ridiculous to charge for air conditioning or towels. In this case, Tune Hotels is absolutely clear about the fees and concept on their website. The traveler who complained about it certainly had the option to stay elsewhere if budget hotels were not his or her style of travel.
What I don’t understand is why hotels that don’t charge extra fees don’t advertise this. This would be a HUGE selling point, I would rank it up there with the airlines that don’t charge for baggage. I am an avid business traveler so I have become accustomed to the NYC occupancy fee and etc. but if I have the choice between two similar hotels, one with a resort fee and one without, most likely I am choosing the latter of the two. When I am making a reservation I usually ask the agent if they could please find out if there are any type of fees that hotel charges such as facilities charges, refort fees, gym fees.. and I make note of it so the next time I am travelign to that city I know. And, you should never book with a company that charges you to modify your reservation. If you are not booking directly with the hotel, book with a third party company like quikbook. They let me make, change, and cancel my reservations without a charge, and I don’t pay a thing until I check out.
What I hate are “phony” room sales. There are hotels that ALWAYS advertise 50% OFF room rates sales, yet, they NEVER charge their printed “rack rate.” Their “sale rate” is really their regular rate. They then make up for it with resort fees, high parking charges, etc.
Here in Palm Springs, we have some hotels that do that. It is very misleading as people who do not know any better think they are staying at a nicer quality hotel and that the rooms really are on sale.
In my opinion, hotels should have to consistently charge the higher rate, like 50% of the time or more, before they could advertise a sale. Otherwise it is just false advertising.