Cosmopolitan Las Vegas Hits Guests With Gratuity, Service Charge and a 22% Tip — All on One Bill [Roundup]

by Gary Leff

News and notes from around the interweb:

  • Only in Vegas: Gratuity, service charge, and tip – all billed separately by Cosmopolitan. Would you like $26 water or to charge your laptop? That’ll be $50.

  • For your health, you should get out of your plane clothes right away as soon as you arrive at home or at your hotel. (HT: @crucker)

  • The Wall Street Journal covers Citi’s messy shut down of people who used a link to apply for Strata Elite that wasn’t intended for them but that wound up very well for the customers (waived annual fee, waived spending requirement to earn the initial bonus). What is strking to me though is this line,

    Over the years, banks have closed many workarounds for racking up points, such as a rebate promotion more than two decades ago that let a man claim $25,000 worth of miles by buying $3,140 of pudding

    Exsqueeze me, baking powder? Dave Phillips a.k.a. Pudding Guy on FlyerTalk did this with Healthy Choice pudding, no banking products involved, and the story was memorialized in the Adam Sandler / P.T. Anderson film Punch-Drunk Love.

  • People will pay a premium for Waymo over Uber. And, it turns out, Uber drivers will take less money not to have to deal with you, too!

  • U.S. Transportation Secretary wants flights to be a more somber affair. Meanwhile on the other side of the earth:

  • Aerolineas Argentinas is profitable now and “is acquiring 18 new planes (Airbus A330neos and Boeing 737 MAXs), retrofitting its long haul aircraft (including with a new business class), and introducing Wi-Fi throughout the fleet.”

  • Yikes in the face of Air India recalcitrance, the U.S. threatened to pull support for the Air India Boeing 787 crash investigation.

    The private view among many American government and industry officials is that the evidence so far points to Air India Flight 171’s captain, Sumeet Sabharwal, who died in the event, having deliberately crashed the plane.

    …At the crash site, Indian authorities initially wouldn’t let American investigators take their own photos of the wreckage, according to people familiar with the matter. They also moved some of the wreckage before U.S. investigators could examine it.

    …U.S. government and industry officials believe the captain likely moved the switches to cut off fuel supply, the Journal has reported. The captain remained calm while the first officer seemed to panic, exclaiming in the final moments, “Oh s—!” according to people familiar with an air-traffic control recording.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. My sister and her boyfriend delivered for UberEats for quite a while, mostly as a first-pass “what restaurants might we want to try eating at” screen.

    Delivering for UberEats makes something easy that’s otherwise awkward: go hand out for 3-5 minutes in random restaurants, and see what the general vibe is. This is particularly helpful for the sort of random ethnic take-out places that they enjoyed.

  2. Hooray for in-flight friendships.

    Pudding for miles? How deliciously absurd.

    Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving! Safe holiday travels and beyond, including those going to Zorkfest (speaking of Vegas)!

  4. While getting out of clothes worn on a flight as soon as possible sounds like a good thing, I doubt that there is much of a health threat posed by the clothes. From my experience since Covid-19, much more of a threat is posed by breathing in what others breath out and that threat can be decreased by correctly wearing a high quality facemask such as one rated N95, for the duration of the time in airports and on flights.

  5. Gee I wonder why people feel like they’re being taken advantage of in Las Vegas?

    Both interesting and strange about Indian authorities interfering with the crash site. What would make the country look worse than a painfully transparent coverup?

  6. This is ok. It’s a hotel that is here for profit. To satisfy the guest on all their desires. Not for a petty price. You pay if you to lazy to go elsewhere. It’s all the idiot guest that complains. Pay your bill and shut your mouth you ordered it. Who cares the price. Use your chase sapphire reserve and get 3 points per dollar and be happy. People is stupid to complain

  7. I went to Reddit and looked at the comments. As Im sure most of you guessed, yep, this person ordered room service. Room service is just a damn well known grift. So while the bill is insane, and Caesars (or MGM, can’t remember who owns Cosmo) is still pulling BS itemized charges, I’m more ashamed at OP for even ordering room service.

    Someone else in the Reddit thread mentioned the $10 plate and silverware charges and suggested, WHELP, they are yours now, take them home. And I 100% agree lol

  9. He paid a service fee for room service, the restaurant added a gratuity, and he added a tip to that.

  10. Gratuity is an imposed service charge.
    Tip is voluntary.
    So for a rip-off trifecta,
    A service charge on top of a service charge added to a service charge.
    Avoid this place at all costs.

  12. Just to note, the Cosmo thing was a little bit of a scam by the person. The 22% tip was added by the poster, you can freely select $0 for a tip.

  13. Can you imagine Las Vegas as a ‘ghost town’? Tumbleweed rolling through the streets; guided tours through still-furnished but abandoned hotels; functioning 1-cent slot machines in vacant casinos; charter flights into McCarran on refurbished Constellations and DC6s? Hell, it could make Las Vegas a tourist destination! What a concept!

  14. Perhaps the person tipped by accident and I notice the higher tip % is always the default for folks who dont read or pay attention, then they’re surprised after the fact. I dont tip for room service and places where the gratuity is automatically added. You dont have to.

  16. Why does anyone go to Vegas anymore? Place is not very nice and very overpriced. It’s actually pretty full of trashy trash people who try so hard to look like a big shot that instead they look like a bus driver with a loud wife on their honeymoon.

  19. This is why we used to be fairly regular at Las Vegas, but don’t go there anymore. The quality of everything is falling while the prices soar. Bye-bye.

  20. Unless I’m missing something, $20 + $19 + $40 = $79 so they screwed you out of another $10 because they know we don’t check math. For that matter, the percentages need to be verified. This is why I will NEVER go to Vegas.

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