Originally Posted by
darthbimmer
My opinion about what the fees cover is irrelevant. The fees cover whatever management says they cover. Opinion comes in when discussing whether it's a reasonable business practice.
Sometimes the list of things covered by the fee includes things guests might have expected to pay extra for in the past, like internet, parking, and breakfast. Other times it includes things that customers would always have assumed were covered in the nightly rate, like using the pool. Until these fees became popular several years ago how often did hotels ever charge overnight guests a separate fee to use their pool?
Sadly the fact is that most of these fees are garbage fees. They're arbitrary, nonnegotiable amounts tacked on to the nightly room rate so the hotel can advertise a low price in big print, making itself look like a bargain, while quietly collecting a non-bargain price from customers.
In the case of Las Vegas and Orlando the markets are so overbuilt (unless there's a big convention or something) that the price competition was really white-hot in some periods. Isn't this supposed to be what markets are about and how they deliver benefits to consumers?
Well, hotels weren't having any of that and decided to play the unbundling game with the resort fees. They hated the transparency of pricing and all the price-comparison sites, and the idea with resort fees was to try to have a mandatory amount shielded from the price competition. If the sites got to where they'd only quote the "true" cost (as has happened with airlines thanks to the DOT regulation) you'd be back to where it was, but of course the hotels will fight tooth and nail against that kind of transparency.