Tag Archives for fees.
Back in the fall I wrote about the Holiday Inn Express in Elko, Nevada charging $12.95 extra per night in addition to the room rate for electricity. They were also charging an extra 3% for guests who wanted to pay with a Chase IHG One Rewards credit card. This hotel apparently keeps changing what the $12.95 is for.
Some businesses are jumping on the tariff narrative to nickel and dime customers for nonsense. The Hampton Inn Dublin in Virginia appeared to impose a $2 fee to print receipts.
The Holiday Inn Express Durango Downtown-Animas River adds a mysterious fee to bookings at the property that’s made out to look like a tax. A reader shares the fee, asking what it could be?
Hilton has a new property system coming onboard to merchandise various aspects of your stay. One of the things they’re standardizing is how hotels upsell late check-out. The price for a confirmed late checkout will be set by brand.
You can only buy tickets in-person at limited hours, but you can’t buy tickets during those hours. That means there’s no real option to buy them in person, which means that booking online isn’t a choice customers are making, and therefore the web booking fee is not optional. Yet Frontier still excludes these charges from their domestic airfare excise tax calculation.
Hotels are nickel and diming guests for things I never used to hear of their charging extra for. The Aloft hotel in McAllen, Texas reportedly billed a guest $80.50 for washcloths because she used them to remove makeup.
Airlines sued to stop the rule, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit issued an injunction suggesting that the carriers were likely to prevail on the merits, and suffer irreparable harm if the rules went into effect in the meantime. DOT itself estimates the cost to comply with the new rules in the hundreds of millions.
The court heard the case, and mostly sided with DOT but still sent the rule back for reconsideration because the agency failed to follow the Administrative Procedures Act is promulgating the final rule.
The Federal Trade Commission has finalized a rule banning deceptive bait-and-switch pricing for hotels, short-term rentals like Airbnb, and event tickets. They’re targeting resort fees, cleaning fees, and other add-ons that aren’t clearly disclosed during pricing display prior to booking.
The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing today on airline fees. It’s the end of this session of Congress, the chair is losing his position as control of the Senate changes party. So there was one last opportunity for grandstanding against airlines, who are a popular punching bag.
Sometimes airlines make it easy! But most of the punching would make for bad policy in ways that would drive up the cost of travel and leave consumers worse off.
Delta, United, American, Spirit and Frontier together generated $12.4 billion between 2018 and 2023 in seat fees alone and that this can be more than checked bag fees – citing United earning $1.3 billion in seat fees vs. $1.2 billion in bag fees last year. The total number is artificially low – fees were down during the pandemic when travel was off.
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 »
