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Comment by waffle_ss | Hacker News Reader

> they advertise one price but actually have tons of mandated fees when you show up to purchase

I had a similar experience booking a hotel room recently. Despite advertising a rate of $x, when I'd click through to complete the booking, towards the end of the process every single one would tack on a mandatory "service fee" of somewhere between $40-80. It seems to me to be a way to keep their room rates artificially lower to stay competitive on the price comparison websites.

(Maybe this has been a thing for a while - I haven't booked a hotel in years)

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"Resort fees" are a thing but in my experience you don't see them a lot outside of what are plausibly actual resorts, i.e. typical hotel chains don't usually have them. Of course, there are always lots of taxes that get tacked on. Especially pre-pandemic, I booked lots of hotels. (AirBnB also has cleaning fees etc. although what little I've used AirBnB they seem to be pretty prominently displayed.)

On Airbnb there is one price displayed on the map (the daily rate), then when you click on a place, the fees are added and the price changes. But that still doesn't include tax and local fees which add more to the price when you go to confirm. So what you see on the map is quite less than the final price.

I believe there are laws in some locations that make Airbnb show the price upfront on the map and they do for those places. But it doesn't seem to be the norm in the US.

Fair enough. I've only ended up staying at an AirBnB once so I'm not terribly familiar with their interface.

This is called "drip pricing" and is actively targeted by the EU, UK and Australia.

Vegas loves these - the last time I stayed on the strip it was $40+/day "resort amenity" fee that they did a great job of hiding throughout the booking and checkin process.

Yeah, Vegas is a particular offender. You can end up paying almost as much in resort fees as you would for a discount casino hotel room itself.

This was in the Seattle and Portland areas, and they were just regular hotels, not resorts.

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