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Check Out Hotel Surcharges
The Travel Tightwad · August 23, 2002

Local calls at the Marriott University Park in Tucson, Ariz., cost a dollar each. So why did Dean Kennedy have to pay $28 for his phone call?

It turns out he'd left his laptop hooked up to the phone one night because he was expecting an important e-mail. "The clerk informed me that local calls were a dollar plus 10 cents per minute for calls over one hour," remembers the Chandler, Ariz., accountant. "When I looked again at the placard, sure enough, some extremely fine print notified me of this charge."

Frustrating, isn't it? Hotel phone charges alone account for more than two percent of a hotel's revenue, according to PKF Consulting. Add in other surcharges, such as fees for faxes and resort amenities, and you're talking about a lot of money-perhaps as much as one-tenth of a hotel's income. No wonder properties are stepping up efforts to impose and collect these extras.

At a time like this you need to know how to escape from the surcharge labyrinth that many hotels drop you into. Many surcharges are nothing more than shameless efforts to get inside your pocketbook or wallet. Evading them can mean saving serious money. Here's how.

The completely ridiculous surcharge

Ro Logrippo has seen "processing" fees for canceled reservations at some small hotels in New England. Not to be confused with cancellation fees, these fees are similar to restocking fees charged by retailers that get a returned product. Only, there's nothing to restock, except, presumably, their own bank accounts.

How to get around it: Either make alternative payment arrangements (leave your credit card out of it) or dispute the charges on your credit card once you get the bill. These fees are rarely if ever disclosed at the time of booking. Simply tell the innkeeper that you'll refuse to pay. Odds are the extra charge will be promptly removed.

Right fee, wrong time

Gwen Curran, a retiree from Forest Ranch, Calif., was shocked to find a $3 energy surcharge on a bill at the Silver Legacy Resort Casino in Reno, Nev. "They had an energy surcharge last year, when I stayed in San Francisco. But isn't the energy crisis over?" Curran asks. Indeed, it is. But hotels have been slow to remove the fees because they're helping them get through a bad year.

How to get around it: Your case will be stronger if you can show that the hotel didn't warn you about the energy surcharge. But your secret weapons are the facts. If there's no energy crisis, what's the energy surcharge for?

The "euphemism" fee

Brian Talbot, a postal clerk from Shelton, Conn., stayed at the Wyndham Casa Marina in Key West, Fla., recently, and discovered that in addition to his nightly rate of $295, the hotel added a "convenience charge" of $11 a day. "It covered the costs of providing the extra amenities such as free ice, free beach towel service, free use of beach chair, free use of the part of the mini-fridge that wasn't occupied by vending merchandise, daily room cleaning, etc.," he says. Of course, the fee is neither convenient, nor is it legitimate. And it begs the question: What's the other $295 for?

How to get around it: Talbot had the fee reversed by showing that he wasn't adequately informed about it. Otherwise, he insisted, he would have never agreed to stay at the hotel. Here, again, the threat of a credit card dispute might make a greedy innkeeper give in. There's one final way to get out of a surcharge, and that's to prove how good a customer you are. Consider how Kennedy talked his way out of his $28 bill. It wasn't necessarily his debating skills that saved the day. "I think their willingness to remove the ridiculous charge probably arose from my Marriott Platinum status more than anything else," he says.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Key Largo, Fla. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.