Darn All Those Nickel and Dime Hotel Fees

By all accounts the U.S. lodging industry had a dismal year in 2001, perhaps the worst in two decades, and this year isn’t looking much better. Average occupancy fell by 5.7% last year, and room rates slipped 1.4%, according to Smith Travel Research, which tracks industry trends. For the week ending March 2, both figures were down about 5% from last year.

You would think harried hoteliers would try to avoid annoying their guests. But that’s evidently not the case with some of them, judging from a small avalanche of reader mail tumbling into the Travel section’s bins. The top complaint: fees tacked onto room bills, often without warning.

There are resort fees, energy surcharges, California tourism fees and, I’ve learned, even a “reservation processing fee.” (Yes, a fee for taking your room reservation.) Together with local and state taxes, they can increase the bill by 20% or more.

It’s hard to tell whether extra fees are becoming more prevalent or whether money-conscious consumers are just getting crankier about them. Statistics on the amounts and occurrence of such fees are hard to come by. But several experts I’ve consulted agree on the solution: Dispute the charges.

“If you get stubborn at the front desk on checkout, you may find [the fee] is pretty easily erased,” says Robert Mandelbaum, director of research for PKF Consulting, a hotel industry research firm. Many of the fees were imposed in the late 1990s or 2000, a boom year, “but as the market gets soft there’s been a lot of consumer resentment,” he says. “Hotels don’t have the leverage they used to have” as a result of diminished demand.

Here’s a checklist of some add-ons that may show up on your room bill, starting with the one I found most egregious:

* Reservation processing fee: I was skeptical when I read a letter from Judy Huska of La Crescenta saying the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas charged her $4.91 just for making a reservation--and that it didn’t disclose the fee until she checked out.

Silly me.

When I called the Riviera’s reservations desk on March 5, the clerk offered me a $79-per-night weekend rate for a room in April. With tax, it was $86.11, she said.

“Are there any other charges?” I asked. Yes--a $3-per-night energy surcharge and a $10.90 charge for canceling a reservation any time after making it, I was told.

I asked her again if there were any other charges, and she assured me there were none.

What about the reservation fee? I asked. Only then was I told there was an “automatic charge on checkout” of $4.91. I asked to be transferred to a supervisor (she declined to give her full name), who confirmed that guests pay the fee at the front desk. “We don’t have anything to do with that,” the supervisor said.

Riviera manager Geoff Robinson says the fee covers credit-card processing, postage on the letter confirming the reservation, post-departure correspondence and archiving and microfilming of records. He declined to say why the charge wasn’t included in the room rate or disclosed at the outset, referring me to the hotel’s public relations office, which did not return several telephone calls seeking comment. “If [guests] object, we’ll be glad to take it off the bill,” Robinson added.

If they notice it, that is.

* Resort fee: This fee has begun appearing in the last few years, partly to address a consumer complaint. “People felt they were being nickel-and-dimed to death” by charges for towels, gym access and other services and facilities at resort hotels, Mandelbaum says. So these were wrapped into one fee, charged to everybody. Problem is, not everybody uses these facilities.

I called the Westin Mission Hills Resort in Rancho Mirage, Calif., earlier this month. The reservations clerk told me it charges a $14-per-day resort service fee, on top of the room rate, to cover in-room coffee and tea, daily delivery of the newspaper, valet parking, 24-hour access to the fitness center and access to tennis and basketball courts. I called back and asked: What if I don’t plan to use those services? Do I still have to pay the fee? “It’s a mandatory fee,” the clerk replied.

Another issue with the resort fee is how and whether the fee is disclosed. That’s the subject of a $100-million lawsuit filed last month in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of Westchester, against industry giant Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., which operates the Westin Mission Hills Resort and more than 700 other hotels. The class-action suit contends that Starwood misrepresents the resort fee as a government tax and sometimes fails to disclose the fee when the reservation is made.

Starwood declined comment, citing the litigation.

“In our experience, they never tell you about the resort fee unless you really push them,” says Peter D. Morgenstern, a partner in the New York law firm that filed the suit.

The Rancho Mirage hotel clerk told me about the resort service fee when I asked whether there were any extra charges. In the hotel’s listing on Starwood’s Internet site, www.starwood.com, the sales tax and resort fee were listed as “room tax information.”

* Energy surcharge: Many hotels, including the lodges at Yosemite National Park, imposed this “temporary” surcharge last year, saying they needed it to cover spiraling costs caused by the energy crisis. Initially confined to California, Oregon and Washington, it soon spread to other states, provoking a spate of negative publicity. Starwood is among several major companies that have ended the surcharge, typically about $2 to $4 per room per night, as the crisis has eased; Yosemite ended it Dec. 31. But the charge is still around.

In Las Vegas the MGM Grand, Treasure Island, Caesars Palace, Bally’s, the Flamingo Hilton, Harrah’s and the Rio are among hotels that have ended the surcharge, according to the Las Vegas Advisor newsletter. But the Riviera still has it. The Comfort Suites in Carpinteria adds a $1.93-per-night energy surcharge, I was told when I called earlier this month.

* And some others: You may also see a “California tourism” fee, commonly 10 or 15 cents per night. Under a 1997 law, California hotels have agreed to contribute $450 per $1 million worth of annual sales to a state fund that promotes tourism. It’s up to the hotel whether it wants to absorb the fee or charge it separately.

I’m indebted to reader Tim Seeley of Joliet, Ill., for spotting this one: The Comfort Inn in Powell, Tenn., near Knoxville, charges a “safe warranty fee” of $1 per night plus 13 cents tax for the in-room safe. The fee is “automatically posted through the computer” but can be removed if you ask on checkout, hotel manager Richard Settlemyer says.

I’m not sure I feel safer knowing that.

*

Jane Engle welcomes comments and suggestions but cannot respond individually to letters and calls. Write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012, or e-mail jane.engle@latimes.com.