Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jayjami
Every time I book a room in Vegas, the resort fees are calculated in the total price right before your credit card is charged. It is no different than a city’s hotel tax, sales tax, or parking fees not being advertised in the price. If you don’t like the way a business operates, you are free to stay somewhere else. That is the way our free market capitalist system works.
Your answer was so tough to respond to that I decided to take almost a year to think of what to say.
After 50 weeks of tossing and turning each night over this answer, I'm ready to respond to you.
This is not the "free market capitalist" system. If it were, there would be no need for resort fees. They would simply publish the full price up front, and the best deal would win.
The only purpose of resort fees is to mislead. Initially it had a dual purpose -- to mislead AND cheat both travel agents out of commission and cities out of tax. However, the tax dodge thing has long been stopped, and the travel agents are often getting commission on resort fees.
So now it's really just there to mislead people.
Much of our hotel booking comes from internet searches, often through aggregator sites like Trivago, or from large travel websites like Orbitz. Resort fees are in place to mislead the consumer into not being able to tell the actual price of the rooms he's searching for. If you see one hotel listed as $100 and the other as $110 (which are equivalent quality), you would choose the $100 one, only to find out at the end of the whole booking process that there's a $45 resort fee. Then you're faced with the unpalatable choice of either just dealing with it, or having to go back and all the way through booking the $110 hotel, and see what their resort fee is, so you can properly compare. So if the $110 hotel has only a $20 resort fee, it's actually $15 cheaper, and you would have picked that had you known. But most people don't go back to bother to check this, because it's time consuming and a huge pain in the ass.
That's one problem. Another problem is that it's a price bait-and-switch. Perhaps the consumer really doesn't want to take the trip if the hotel is going to be $145/night plus tax instead of $100 plus tax, but by the time he gets to the end of the booking process and becomes emotionally invested in going (perhaps even telling his wife/girlfriend/kids that he's booking it), he notices the bad news about the extra $45/night. Again, it's an unpalatable choice to either bail out and let everyone down, or just pay the hidden-til-the-end resort fee.
I'm surprised you don't advocate clear and direct price listings, where the consumer fully understands what he is going to pay at the time of search.
What would possibly be a valid reason to separate the price into base price and mandatory fee, if not to mislead?
It's not at all like government tax, because government tax is the exact same percentage for each hotel in each market, yet resort fees differ wildly. Additionally, government taxes are rarely above 15%, whereas resort fees are sometimes over 100% of the hotel base price!
What if, at at the supermarket, each item had a hidden fee, but you had the opportunity to put back any item at the time of checkout if the fee made the price too high? Would you be cool with that system? Or would you say that the actual full price should be listed on the shelves?
