“If your mother says she loves you, get confirmation.” This piece of advice, which can only be the sign of someone who has spent too many Thanksgivings, Christmases and Saint Swivens Days (that last one always hurt the most) in a newsroom rather than grandmother’s dining room, was actually a literal sign on the desk of one of my newsroom ex-pats in the early days of my career. I’m not sure I ever bought in to that level of skepticism, even in my days as an investigative reporter, but when it comes to traveling in general, and avoiding costly hotel fees in particular, skepticism should be the order of the day when it comes to whether you’re seeing the whole picture..
So let’s talk a little more about hotel fees.
I’ve written about steps you can take to make the actual process of traveling to a hotel, booking a hotel and staying in a hotel easier. However, avoiding hotel fees can have a big impact on your wallet. As always, the goal when it comes to travel should be to make the very issue of money a secondary issue – traveling, after all, is about the journey, about enjoying the color and richness of your experience – but let’s face it. If you can’t enjoy the width and breadth of your experience because you can’t afford it or have to blow your budget because of an unexpected hotel fee or resort fee thanks to a few extra packages of macadamia nuts from the minibar or, more likely, some other unexpected hotel fees that weren’t on your radar, the journey loses steam.
Most of us know to leave the minibar alone and to leave it for something useful… say, as an extra surface to put your keys where you can find them the next morning. Hotel bean counters know this, and they know the other nooks and crannies in their bill where you will look for fees that don’t make sense. So they’re creating brand new and exciting (said with tongue planted firmly in cheek) ways to add hotel fees that may be new to you. Worse, you may have no idea these fees are being charged. Many online booking sites do not provide a breakdown of the fees you’re being charged. Priceline sometimes does this, but not always, and many sites just give you the grand total.
I want to offer this list of fees. but truth in advertising… It’s not comprehensive, and the reason it’s not is that I want to write about hotel fees that are at least in some cases negotiable. The hotel and CVB (Convention and Visitors Bureau) tax that a city government requires a hotel to add? Getting that lopped off your bill is a nonstarter. And if you feel compelled to dive into the six ounce bottle of ginger ale in the minibar – or even the innocent looking bottle of Dasani on the dresser, well, you know that nothing in a hotel room is really free, or you should. However, these are fees you may, and I use that word on purpose, be able to have reduced or eliminated. Remember that hotels in most cities are operating in a buyer’s market. They are literally everywhere, and if you do your homework ahead of time, you can use your travel funds for what they’r designed for… traveling.
Let’s dive in.
The high wire act of avoiding the wifi hotel fee
On our recent production swing through Australia and New Zealand, we became intimately acquainted with the bait and switch nature of the phrase “free wifi” in hotel descriptions. Almost every time, this meant “free wifi in the lobby.” Wifi in the room was not only a billable addition, it was billed in crazy and inventive ways – by the day, the hour, and in some cases by the minute. In one case, it was billed by the megabyte. A 200 MB plan cost $20 AUD (Australian dollars). As a means of reference, one Netflix movie streamed in HD is about 3600 MB. A 200 MB plan is pretty skimpy.
Her’s what you do. First, see if your phone has free international data or if you can add it for your trip without a contract. As a point of reference, as I write this in the summer of 2015, the international plan on my T-Mobile account has free data in the countries in which we were traveling. It was slower – often 3G at best in some places – but for email and document transfer via Dropbox, it got the job done, and we certainly watched fewer movies while shooting our own… Kimmie Schmidt would have to wait, sadly. You may want to consider that option, and you will also want to research whether setting your phone up as a mobile hotspot is allowed under your calling plan. If it is, you can tether your laptop to your phone’s cellular data signal and avoid wifi entirely.
I would also suggest considering joining a hotel chain’s loyalty program. It gives you leeway to negotiate getting free wifi in the room rather than in just the lobby. Yes, you’ll get more junk mail in your inbox, but the tradeoff could be fewer hotel fees.
Don’t let the hotel fees for parking stop you in your tracks
If you’re staying in a city center, you are very likely facing huge parking fees. Find this out ahead of time, because these hotel fees can often be as high as $50 to $100 per day. I live in San Francisco, and those numbers are the baseline. If you are traveling with a car, you should comparison shop what the hotel charges and what city garages charge. A city garage not connected to the hotel may be close and it may be much less expensive, and so may other private garages. I can’t speak to the wisdom of street parking, because that option is essentially rolling the dice and taking your chances when it comes to safety, but there’s no reason you can’t leave the baggage with one person in your party while you park the car in a garage with lower daily rates.
Speaking of baggage…
Emotional baggage, literally
Because that’s how you’ll feel – very emotional – when you find out that their hotel charges resort fees (even if you’re to staying at a resort, that’s what they sometimes call it) to put your bags in storage while you wait for the official check in time or to put them in storage after the official check out time while you do more sightseeing. Again, you may be able to use your leverage with a hotel’s loyalty program to avoid hotel fees like this one.
Locking down the hotel fee for the room safe
Just about every hotel we stay at during our production shoots has a room safe, and this is by our design. We were traveling with some pretty important documents – work visas, passports, filming permits and release forms that could not be duplicated if they were lost or stolen. What we didn’t know was that many hotels, including three of the nine hotels we stayed in during the production, charged for the use of the safe. Not only that, they charged for the very existence of the safe. The hotel fee was going to be applied whether or not we even used the safe. I was able to get this charge removed from one of the hotel bills upon our return, but only because we had stayed at two of the hotel’s properties for enough days… with the promise we would not be staying there again… to have this charge removed. However, you need to do your homework and email or call ahead if necessary to find this information out in advance. If you don’t need a safe, request a room without one, and then make sure you’re still not charged for hotel fees like this anyway.
The energy surcharge fee
This is a hotel fee that is presented as a “what can you do?” kind of fee, almost like a tax. It’s not. it’s a negotiable. Keeping the lights on and the A/C running is the cost of doing business for a hotel, it should not be a revenue generator, and you should be persistent about this issue. This is not a fee that has caught on in a widespread way yet… but it is becoming more common. Keep an eye out for it, and if you don’t see it as a line item on your bill, ask if you’re paying it. This mindset should also apply to anything labeled a groundskeeping fee, especially if the “grounds” are traffic slants and shrubbery.
When it comes to hotel fees , your general rule of thumb should be if you’re not using it, why should you be paying for it? If you didn’t sign on for pool or spa access, you should not be charged for a resort fee that takes this into account. There’s actually a a lot more to be written when it comes to resort fees, but for now, let me link to this article, which I really like.
Just remember that in a buyer’s market, most items are negotiable. When it comes to hotel fees, you should always work with the assumption that if you’re not using it, you shouldn’t pay for it, and that just because they want to sell it, you don’t have to buy it. You can trade services – you’ll pay their energy surcharge but you want free wifi, for example. The point is your travel should be about the traveling itself, not the hotel fees… or any fees, for that matter… that make travel more difficult.
Onwards!
