Hidden hotel fees are on upswing and here to stay

It’s a fair bet that even San Francisco’s snobbiest coffee drinkers would balk at a cup of joe that cost $28. Unless they check into a hotel. That’s what an increasing number of hotel guests are paying for using (or not using) the in-room coffee maker. To be fair, the $28 also covers using (or not using) the fitness center, basic Internet and the phone. Sometimes, there’s a newspaper. It all falls under the hotel industry’s latest questionable cash cow, the resort fee. And while the mandatory fee that’s showing up on hotel bills isn’t exactly new, its use is on the upswing, and the size of it is growing. More than 1,000 hotels in the United States add some form of resort fee — also called “facility fee,” “amenity charge” or “urban fee” — that covers access and services that were once included in the room rate, says Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst with Atmosphere Research Group. “It allows the hotels to advertise a falsely low rate,” Harteveldt says. “That hotel can compete on the rate, and then slap on this resort fee.”

The actual amount of the fee, which Harteveldt called “an indirect rate hike” because guests pay whether or not they use the service, typically ranges from $20 to $25 per day, although the full range is from a couple of dollars per day up to $150 per day at highend luxury resorts. “They force the traveler to pay more than they expect to get a room, not just per stay, but per day. These fees can eat into your budget.”

For example, the resort fee at the Vdara Hotel and Spa in Las Vegas (a town where the fee is almost universal) is $44.22 per room per night. A three-night stay is an extra $132.66 above the room rate and doesn’t include other amenities such as breakfast or parking.

Breaking out ancillary costs from the base fare or rate is not new. Low-cost air carriers such as WOW Airlines or Norwegian are able to advertise rock-bottom rates to Europe because passengers have to pay extra for everything, including food, water, choice of seat and space for any bag bigger than what will fit under the seat. Part of the incentive is because the airline will only pay taxes on the base rate, not always the ancillary costs. (The airlines picked this up from the cruise lines.)

The difference, however, is that in the air, customers don’t pay if they don’t use the service. With the resort fee, you might never see the gym, use the in-room coffee, read a newspaper or use public Internet, but you’ll still pay $25 per day.

The other incentive for hotels to break out a part of the room rate and call it a resort fee is that most large cities have a different rate of tax for the room rate (occupancy tax) than for fees (sales tax), which is generally much lower.

Hardeveldt and other experts recommend doing some homework, including with sites such as Resort Fee Checker (www.resort feechecker.com), which allows users to see which hotels in each city charge a resort fee, how much it is and what it covers. The average rate among the 27 hotels in San Francisco that were charging a resort fee in June, for instance, was $21.60, according to the site. The average in December was $18.50, a six-month increase of 16.8 percent.

In general, it’s a good idea to shop around, read the fine print before booking and call the hotel directly if you’re not sure. If you’re traveling as a family and need more than one room, it might be worth calling the hotel or contacting it through social media to see if you can negotiate waiving the fee, if only for one room.

Lastly, start budgeting your vacation to include the resort fee because, according to Harteveldt, it’s probably here to stay.

“Resort fees will not go away until and unless there is government action,” he says, “or until consumers start voting with their pocketbooks.”