10 Biggest Hotel-Fee Gripes

Parking

Nobody expects free parking at a hotel on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Chicago's Gold Coast, or San Francisco's Union Square. But when you stay in a suburban or highway location or even in a car-centric downtown area such as the Las Vegas Strip, you don't expect to pay for parking unless it's a valet lot. And sometimes you encounter parking fees when you don't expect them, at hotels surrounded by large, open parking areas. Even when parking fees seem justified, travelers often find them excessive.

Gouge Index: Low. Building and maintaining parking spaces and garages in areas with high land values is genuinely expensive for hotels.

Avoiding the Gouge: If you're driving, avoid staying in a city-center hotel if you can. That's easy to do if you're renting a car on your trip: Just don't rent it until you need to get out of town, or return it before your stay. But if you're driving your own car, you'll have to trade the convenience of a midtown location, with its stiff parking charges, against the inconvenience of a suburban location.

Wi-Fi

Travelers ask, "How is it that a $50-a-night motel can offer free Wi-Fi but a $500-a-night luxury hotel charges an extra $20 a day?" The easy answer is that the budget motel needs free Wi-Fi to be competitive, while the expensive hotel can get away with the gouge. But maybe not for long: Surveys show that more and more hotel visitors expect to find free in-room Wi-Fi, and even the snootiest places may soon decide that meeting expectations is important. A corollary is that Wi-Fi—especially paid Wi-Fi—is s-l-o-w! Wi-Fi isn't just for emails anymore; travelers use it to download videos and for other bandwidth-hogging tasks.

Gouge Index: High. Travelers know that budget properties routinely provide free Wi-Fi, and they see stiff Wi-Fi fees as a gouge.

Avoiding the Gouge: Not all expensive hotels charge for Wi-Fi. Last year, a survey of the 25 hotels in New York City that Expedia lists as "five stars" found that 13 of the 25 charge extra—typically $15 per night—but the other 12 do not. Plus, many hotel booking engines now allow users to screen for free Wi-Fi, so you can potentially avoid Wi-Fi fees most of the time.

Pool and Beach Towel Fees

Yes, it's trivial, but some of the most annoying gouges are over trivia. You go to a beach hotel; you should get a towel. That's the way most people look at it. And they're right. Hotels that engage in really petty gouges like this are shooting themselves in the foot. The ill will has got to be a greater problem than the small cash return. Only one possible explanation emerges: If the hotel's beach or pool operation is a concession and the fees are the concessioner's only source of revenue.

Gouge Index: High on annoyance, low on dollars.

Avoiding the Gouge: Can you take one of your room towels down to the pool? Otherwise, the best bet is just to go with the flow—or go up to your room dripping in the elevator.

Resort Fees

By whatever name—resort, concierge, porterage, energy, housekeeping—mandatory hotel fees are worse than mere annoyances—they're scams. One big Vegas Strip hotel's website notes, "The resort fee includes in-room high-speed Internet and Wi-Fi; daily USA Today newspaper; local and toll-free numbered calls; outgoing faxes, copies, and boarding-pass printing; and free access to the Cardio Room." That statement is a flat-out lie. If a fee is mandatory, it's part of the price. Period! It does not actually correspond with any specific features or services a hotel might list, no matter how plausible. Those lists are excuses in a league with "the dog ate my homework."

Yes, the hotel usually (but not always) notifies guests of the fees before they actually make a reservation. But burying part of the true price in a phony carved-out "fee" can seriously distort the buying process.

Gouge Index: Off the charts.

Avoiding the Gouge: You can't, in areas where this is endemic, including Hawaii, Las Vegas, much of the Caribbean, and many other resort areas. Reportedly, if you complain, some hotels may take the resort fee off the bill.

Early Check-In and Checkout

Hotels often charge extra for early check-in, if they let you in the room at all. One of the worst examples tends to happen when you arrive in Europe after a miserable overnight flight in a too-small economy seat. Your flight arrives at 8 a.m., you get to your hotel by 9:30, and the hotel says that check-in isn't until 2 p.m. The result? A budget hotel lobby full of bleary-eyed arrivals, surrounded by their baggage, waiting for their rooms.

Still, hotels have a point. They orchestrate checkout and check-in to minimize vacancies, and they typically allow guests to stay until 11 a.m. or noon, so they can't let you in to your room at 10 a.m. when the folks who stayed there the previous night haven't checked out yet. The only way to guarantee an early check-in is for the hotel to keep a room empty the night before—and that's bad for the hotel's bottom line.

Early checkout is more of a gouge. You decide to leave a day earlier than you reserved, and the hotel dings you for that extra day anyhow, or at least levies a stiff charge. Presumably, though, had you reserved for fewer days, the hotel might have found another potential guest for the night you canceled. But paying for a room you don't use is highly annoying.

Gouge Index: Low to medium. This is annoying, but it's often justified.

Avoiding the Gouge: Often, you can't. Many hotel loyalty programs, however, promise early check-in as a membership benefit—but it's almost always subject to availability. As to early checkout, you can usually determine a hotel's policy before you reserve; if your plans are at all uncertain, stay somewhere that doesn't assess such a charge.

Hotel Taxes

A few years ago, the National Business Travel Association reported that, in the 50 largest U.S. cities, hotel taxes added an average of about $30 per night to hotel costs; the top cost, $41 per day, was in Chicago. Presumably, those figures are higher today.

In most locations, hotels are subject to the same sales taxes that locals pay when they shop; those taxes amount to about two-thirds of the abovementioned $30 figure. The other third of the tax take, however, is in discriminatory levies that deliberately target visitors. Often, they are dedicated to supporting the city's tourist and convention agencies, but some are for purposes that have nothing to do with travel and provide no benefit to visitors whatsoever. Sadly, out-of-town visitors are a much easier target for local taxing authorities than the folks who live and vote in those local areas. When visitor taxes are involved, taxation without representation is alive and well in the travel industry.

Gouge Index: Moderate.

Avoiding the Gouge: Other than staying in a destination where taxes are lower, you can't avoid this one. Further, staying outside the city in order to enjoy lower taxes is probably more expensive in commuting costs and lost time than simply paying the taxes. Not long ago, you could avoid hotel taxes by staying in a vacation rental, but these days, many visitor centers have wised up to this "leakage" and are taxing vacation rentals as hotels.

Additional Guests

You're on a family trip, your room is the typical double-double or double-queen you get in highway motels these days, and the motel wants an extra fee if you decide to have your two kids share one of the doubles. It's annoying. Having those kids share a bed doesn't add to a hotel's costs at all. But on the other hand, if the extra guests use a bed that wouldn't otherwise be used, the housekeeping staff has to do a bit more work.

Gouge Index: Moderate to high. The degree of the gouge depends on how much extra work (and laundry) the hotel has to do because of the extra guests.

Avoiding the Gouge: Many hotel chains promise the same rate for up to four guests in a room. If you travel that way, check for hotels that won't gouge you.

Minibar Drinks and Snacks

You've seen it: $4 for a can of Coke, $8 for a Bud Light. Sometimes the automatic billing system in the minibar charges you even if you move one of those precious cans, bottles, or packages. And don't dare use the minifridge to cool something you bring in yourself. If you remove something and put it back, you could get charged.

Gouge Index: High.

Avoiding the Gouge: Easy. Don't use the minibar! Seriously, some writers have suggested that hotels would take in more revenue by lowering minibar prices to reasonable levels and actually selling some stuff. But so far, nobody seems to have received that message.

Third-Party Reservation Fees

Reportedly, some third-party online travel agencies (OTAs) like Expedia add fees to the hotel rates they quote. That's hard to prove. Results on hotel websites seldom show rates that differ from the best OTA rates.

However, booking fees on rooms arranged through some opaque agencies are both big and annoying. For example, on a $200 hotel stay in New York City, Priceline adds $49 in taxes and fees to the bid; of that, about $33 is tax, leaving a fee of $16 that goes to Priceline.

Gouge Index: High, where it happens.

Avoiding the Gouge: Always check a hotel's own website to compare prices with those listed on booking sites. And figure in that fee when you bid through an opaque OTA.

Telephone Surcharge

Use a hotel's phone and you could generally run up a phone bill that exceeds your room charge. This used to be a real problem. But technology has bailed out almost everyone: Now that smartphones have become virtually ubiquitous, hotel phones go untouched for days.

The problem may be a bit more severe for overseas visitors who don't have cell phones that work locally. A few years ago, a London hotel diverted calls for AT&T's international line to its own vendor, which charged $5 per minute. Now that's a real gouge.

Gouge Index: High, but increasingly rare.

Avoiding the Gouge: As noted, use a smartphone. Depending on your supplier and your plan, make whatever roaming arrangements you need for the places you're visiting. For some ideas, read 10 Ways to Prepare Your Cell Phone for a Trip.

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