Hotels get creative in adding on costs

Among surcharges, fees are ones for in-room coffee, pool towels, gym access

As hotel fees hit record highs, even the free in-room coffee is no longer sacred.

For Laura Schooling, the only thing worse than being jet-lagged in a hotel room and finding no coffee is discovering that in-room caffeine is available — but for $3.50 a K-Cup.

“I went to get my coffee in the morning, and it just felt like such a scam,” said Schooling, who traveled frequently in a former job as a marketing executive based in the San Francisco Bay area and encountered the costly coffee during a stay at the Empire Hotel in New York City.

“It just seems petty,” she said. “It’s not about the money — it’s about the principle.”

The Empire Hotel’s parent company, Amsterdam Hospitality, did not respond to requests for comment.

Unfortunately for travelers, fees and surcharges are a growing moneymaker for hotels and not likely to go away anytime soon. New research from the Jonathan M. Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism at New York University indicates that hotels in the United States will tack on $2.55 billion in fees this year — the highest amount since Bjorn Hanson, a professor at the center, began tracking them in 2000.

Like the airlines, hotels came to embrace add-on fees gradually. For years, the annual total for the hotel industry in the United States hovered around $1 billion, except in 2002, when the aftermath of 9/11 and the dot-com bust left many hotels scrambling to fill rooms and reluctant to foist extra fees on guests.

But beginning about a decade ago, annual growth in the fees really began to pick up. With the exception of 2009 — a bruising year for hotels in the fallout from the financial crisis — the amount collected in fees has risen every year since the recession ended.

The good news now, if it can be called that, is that the rate of increase has slowed.

“The growth isn’t as large as it’s been, but that’s only because there’s been so much in the past,” Hanson said.

“It’s almost a challenge to come up with a new category of charges,” he said. “The easier ones to think of have mostly been introduced.”

But hotels are rising to the creative challenge.

MGM Resorts International drew complaints from customers and even inspired a Change.org petition this year after introducing what it termed “modest” parking fees of up to $10 a night at its Las Vegas properties — a departure for hotels and casinos along the Strip.

In a blog post, the chief executive of MGM Resorts International, Jim Murren, argued that paid parking was a necessary evil in an evolving market. But patrons and visitors complained on social media and expressed concern that MGM’s competitors would see an opportunity and follow suit.

More hotels, not only in Las Vegas, are adding parking fees, even for unattended selfparking. And hotels all over the country are adding fees for perks that used to be free or based on availability, like late checkout or early checkin, or a request for a room on a high floor or one with a king-size bed. Some are adding bellhop charges for help with bags or for holding luggage — fees separate from the tips travelers already give the bell staff.

Hanson said those billions of dollars in add-ons would probably be even greater if not for the fact that much of the new lodging coming onto the market today is limitedservice hotels, like Holiday Inn Express, where fewer services mean fewer opportunities to tack on fees.

Also helping offset the fee frenzy is the trend among hotels to dangle free Wi-Fi as a carrot to induce guests to join their loyalty programs. But free broadband goes only so far.

“I think consumers in a lot of instances feel like they’re being nickel-and-dimed,” said Bobby Bowers, senior vice president for operations at the hotel research and data company STR. “It just gets on your nerves.”

Resort fees, in particular, have long been an irritant for visitors to places like Las Vegas and Florida. The fees typically cover amenities like pool towels, beach chairs, fitness-center access and a daily newspaper — and guests are required to pay whether or not they actually use any of those things.

Now resort fees are turning up in urban locations as well, and their costs are rising, said Randy Greencorn, co-founder of ResortFeeChecker.com.

“We are seeing an increase in the actual amounts being charged,” he said, with some hotels charging as much as $50 on top of the regular rate — an amount that can double the price of some offpeak rooms in Las Vegas, he said. “I think the problem is that hotels will keep increasing their fees until consumers push back.”

A big part of the annoyance is the surprise factor. The Federal Trade Commission said in 2012 that hotels must disclose mandatory resort fees to guests. But travelers often overlook the disclosures at the time of booking, and by the time they reach the front desk, they are usually not in a position to go elsewhere.

Traveler advocacy groups are pressing the FTC to revisit the issue.

“When only the room rate is provided, consumers are given a false price,” said Charles Leocha, chairman and a founder of Travelers United. “When the hotel has mandatory fees, if they’re mandatory, they must be included in the room rate.”

Two Democrats in Congress, Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Rep. Suzan DelBene of Washington, have also been trying to legislate a solution.

McCaskill introduced legislation that would make hoteliers roll the resort fee into the room rate, rather than break it out as a separate charge. DelBene sent a letter to the FTC in January urging the agency to take action, and plans to introduce a companion bill to McCaskill’s, according to her office.

This would mean fewer unexpected expenses for travelers like Ed MacConnell.

MacConnell, who lives in Bucks County, Pa., stayed last spring at the Melia Orlando Suite Hotel at Celebration, in Florida, while closing a real estate deal. He recalls being surprised to find that on top of the room rate of about $200, he was charged a $15 nightly resort fee for in-room coffee, water and pool towels. It grated all the more, he said, because the housekeeping staff forgot to provide the water and coffee some days.

“I’m sure it was probably in the fine print somewhere,” he said. “It’s not even the matter of paying it. It’s paying it to not get it.”