Hotel Fees
What does a hotel junk fee look like?
Let’s say you’re booking a room this month at the Grayson Hotel by Hyatt. It may show up as $331 for a room per night in an online search tool like Google or Expedia. But once you are in the checkout process, the real price goes up to $421.
When you click on the details, you will see the added taxes, which you would expect. But less expected is a vague $34 destination fee — which includes Wi-Fi, gym access and a 10 percent discount at the hotel’s restaurant — charged daily. That’s about 8 percent of the cost of the room.
After a few days, those small charges add up.
“What we have is nontransparent, deceptive pricing,” said Chuck Bell, a director at Consumer Reports, who has been opposing junk fees for years. “The travel provider is reluctant to tell you the full price upfront, so they hide it.”
Though hotels make it difficult to see their resort fees, many resources online regularly track the charges.
Resort Fee Checker lets you search for a hotel to see if it charges resort fees and, if so, how much. NerdWallet, a personal finance site, conducted an analysis this year on the biggest offenders of resort fees. Wyndham Properties, Hyatt and IHG charged the highest, from 3.8 percent to 6.5 percent, on average, of the total cost of a room, the study found.
Another best practice is to check prices directly through a hotel’s website rather than a third-party agency like Expedia or Priceline. That’s because hotels occasionally charge different resort fees to those booking through third parties. And if you join hotel loyalty programs, they often offer to waive resort fees for returning customers.
Airfare
Airlines make the process extra painful, because additional fees are generally not shown until deep into the ticket booking process. After you have already picked a flight and punched in your personal information, you are then shown what it would cost to select seats or check a bag.
