Awful travel fees are probably here to stay
But the big question is, if we refuse to pay, will the fees just go away?
If enough travelers stopped paying the travel industry’s infuriating surcharges and fees, would the unwanted add-ons simply disappear? Would extra charges for checked luggage, ticket change fees and mandatory hotel resort fees vanish into thin air?
Experts say they should. Readers such as Jan Jacobs wish they would.
“You are in a position to start a movement called ‘Stop paying the travel extortion fees,’ ” says Jacobs, a retired librarian from Tempe, Ariz. “Your voice could start such a movement. I hope you will.”
Jacobs saw my recent story about the most outrageous travel fees. “They should be illegal,” she says. They are not, but efforts to regulate them have stalled. Never fear, say some travel insiders. If enough travelers refused to pay, then the fees would stop. Really?
The truth isn’t so simple. Yes, one or two travel surcharges have been dropped because people refused to pay them. For example, US Airways began charging for soft drinks a few years ago, and it tried to impose a “use-it-or-loseit” policy on tickets. Both of those moves were rescinded after passengers revolted. But what we have now — a fee-based travel industry operating in business where competition has been all but squeezed out — can’t be fixed by market forces alone.
Consider what happened to Jenna Rose Robbins when she boarded a Norwegian Cruise Lines Mediterranean cruise with her best friend last summer. “When we booked the cruise, we were told it was all-inclusive,” says Robbins, an editor and Web consultant based in Berlin. Then she noticed a $12-per-day charge to her room for “gratuities.” She said “no.”
Fine, a cruise line representa- tive told her. She could contest the “optional” fees once the cruise ended. She did and received a refund. Those fees have since been hiked, and guests seeking to challenge them have to fill out a special form.
Danielle Ford says “no” all the time when she flies on “ultra” low-cost airlines such as Spirit and Frontier. She prints her own boarding pass, travels light and turns down optional items.
“I don’t select a seat,” says Ford, a photographer based in Columbus, Ohio. Though the airlines typically blink when she refuses to pay a fee for an advance seat assignment — often giving her the window seat she wants, anyway — the fees have continued unabated.
Fees are rampant in the airline industry. The ability to check a bag, once included in your ticket price, is extra. For the first time, airlines reported that airlines’ total baggage revenue broke the
$1 billion mark in the first quarter of 2017.
Let’s not forget hotels and their onerous mandatory resort fees. My colleague Erica Sandberg recalls staying at a resort in Carlsbad, Calif., years ago. When she checked out, the bill had a resort fee for extras such as high-speed and wireless Internet access in guest rooms, 24-hour access to the fitness center and, most galling, “charges for local and 800access call connections.”
“I refused to pay the extras that were tacked on, and they backed down,” says Sandberg, a podcaster and consumer finance writer based in San Francisco. The resort, which has since changed owners, was even hauled into court because of the fees.
Did the resort fee disappear? Hardly. Not only are resort fees still here, but they’ve risen almost
9% in the first half of 2017, to an average $21 a night, according to Resortfeechecker.com.