Many of us are desperate to travel this summer after a
pandemic stifled our plans for years. However, travelers should be aware. Those
seemingly cheap plane tickets or hotel rooms advertised online may be a trap to
make you spend more than anticipated.
اضافة اعلان
That is because hotels and airlines, struggling to recoup
their losses from the pandemic, are increasingly resorting to nickel-and-diming
consumers with hidden charges, according to studies and travel experts.
Regulators call these “junk fees.”
They creep in towards the ends of a transaction
You have probably encountered junk fees at least a few times
in your travels. The extra charges can come in many forms, such as fees for
resort amenities, checked luggage, and seat selection, and they’re typically
not disclosed upfront when you use an online search engine. They creep in
toward the end of a transaction.
This strategy in the travel industry, known as “unbundling,”
is not new. However, some fees, such as baggage and seat selection on planes,
crept up during the pandemic, according to studies. And vague hotel resort
fees, which are typically a daily bulk charge of $20 to $50 for basic services
like Wi-Fi and parking, have become commonplace.
All told, hotel-related junk fees cost travelers roughly $3
billion a year, according to Consumer Reports. For airlines, revenue from
ancillary fees, which include carry-on luggage, seat assignments and early
boarding, rose to $102.8 billion in 2022, up 56 percent from the previous year,
according to IdeaWorks, a consulting firm for airlines.
Time and effort to tally up the real cost
That means the days of using search engines like Google,
Expedia, and others to rapidly search for travel deals are long gone. You might
be able to get an idea of the approximate cost of a ticket or hotel room, but
you have to put in a lot more time and effort to tally up the real cost.
“The hotels and airlines want to make it difficult for you
to really compare what your flight or hotel stay will cost because they don’t
like being purchased based just on price,” said Henry Harteveldt, president of
Atmosphere Research, a travel analysis firm in San Francisco.
Junk fees have become so widespread that regulators say the
practice must soon change. The Federal Trade Commission, which began an
investigation into the fees last year, said it planned to announce rules
restricting businesses from charging them in the coming months.
But until new laws come into effect, it’s on us to watch for
deceptive pricing tactics and sidestep them when possible. Here are some ideas
for how to do that.
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.”
Although 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% to 6.5%, 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.
AirfareAirlines 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.
By far the best rule of thumb is to become familiar with a
brand’s business model and the types of fees it typically incurs, Harteveldt
said. It has become common knowledge that budget airlines offering the cheapest
tickets make up for the difference in price by charging more for basic
amenities like seat selection and luggage.
An analysis by NerdWallet in February found that budget
brands Frontier and Spirit Airlines charged the most for seat selection, and
that Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines charged the least.
If you choose an airline that charges for seat selection,
you can opt not to select a seat and then hope to be able to do so with the
customer service representative at the terminal. But that’s a gamble and is
especially not ideal for families.
Putting in time
If you want to travel on a budget, more labor is now
necessary. After plugging in all the numbers for each vendor, tally up the
totals with all the fees included. Only then will you be able to make true cost
comparisons.
In the future, we hopefully won’t need to do this. Doug
Farrar, an FTC spokesperson, said that rather than give consumers advice on how
to deal with the surprise charges, the agency was striving to make businesses
cut junk fees out entirely with rules regulating the practice.
“We’re going to try to end it,” he said. But he added: “I
don’t think you can avoid it, strictly speaking. It’s just baked into the
process.”
Some brands are getting ahead of the regulatory crackdown by
changing their methods. Marriott International said it had recently updated its
room rates to include resort fees when people used its app and website to
search for bookings. Hyatt said in a statement that it planned to do the same.
Of course, that doesn’t mean brands will stop charging the
fees. But it will help to know immediately when a deal isn’t as great as it
seems. Then you can book somewhere else.
Read more Travel
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
