Originally Posted by
chelmkamp
I stayed at the Crowne Plaza in Auckland one week before they tacked on their credit card fee, and again two weeks later. The base price of the room was the same it was when I booked several months before, the same as it was advertised on their website, but I paid 3% more for my second stay. I had no say in the matter -- I had already booked the hotel months prior, and didn't find out about the CC fee until the second time I checked in. By that time, I wasn't able to get out of my booking and go to a hotel without the fee. According to Visa Asia, this was all permissible because of new NZ laws.
This is the key issue. I'm fine with merchants working the cost of business (including accepting credit cards) into the advertised price. I'm NOT fine with businesses tacking on fees to allow them to skirt advertising the real price of the service or product to the consumer.
It takes time for changing costs to be reflected in prices. If a store's rent goes up by 10%, they aren't going to bump up their prices by 10% overnight. Assuming the Crowne Plaza isn't the only hotel in Auckland, sooner or later they will need to adjust their prices downwards in order to reflect their new costs, or some other hotel will do so and take their customers.
As I said earlier, interchange fees are a small percentage of the total cost, and prices are constantly in flux due to dozens of factors, so it is impossible to run a controlled experiment.