Originally Posted by
oliver2002
I am annoyed by European hotels charging more for more than one occupant, and usually only book for one person and see what happens at checkin. In the past 7 years I've never been really challenged by anyone, even when having my wife and two kids standing beside me. The PH in Istanbul once got very nasty, but settled by charging 20€/night extra for my wife because of the 'additional breakfast cost' (never mind that we had a suite via a DSU and I was Hyatt Diamond with free breakfast at the time). A Mercure in Paris saw the family and said 'I better give you a bigger room', the Ramada in Berlin I usually stay at always gives us a suite. I recently redeemed some spg free nights at the Le Meridien in Hamburg and told them I was coming with family, they charged me 60€ for a rollaway bed but made sure we got a really large room. This to address the comment that chain hotels may get nasty.
Well, I don't really mind hotels charging for extra people. Or, I should really say, extra bedding. It makes some sense that a room with 2 queen beds could cost more than a room with 1 queen bed. There's obviously some extra expense in servicing such a room, and it often is larger. Similarly, if breakfast is included, there's real food cost in having extra guests. (We've even had a discussion in the Hyatt forum about their USA Hyatt Place hotels serving cheaper "free breakfast" food on weekends than on weekdays, because they charge "by the room" and there are lots of solo travelers during the week and families on the weekend).
Obviously, though, this extra room cost has to make sense. The most illogical system is what I call the "British" one, traditionally popular in British lodging where you pay solely by the person. If I stay in a room by myself, it will cost 75 Pounds. If I bring my wife, it will cost 150 Pounds, even if we share the same bed. Clearly, a more logical pricing structure would be to charge me about 100 Pounds for a couple.
Bringing kids with you overseas is often problematic, as you can almost never predict how much you'll be charged for them (and, as I mentioned above, sometimes the website rules are different from the "actual" rules). Sometimes they're free to age 18; sometimes to 10, 12, 15 or 16. Sometimes they're never free, but sometimes they're discounted up to these various ages. Sometimes the additional fee is modest (like $10), and sometimes it's silly -- like in the example cited in my original post where a one-year age difference makes the room $50 more. I've previously had situations where I had to "lie" about my kid being 15 when they were 16 to enable me to stay in a particular hotel, because I would have had to stay elsewhere if they had strictly enforced their child pricing rules with a sky-high pricing surcharge.
I do agree that hotel clerks are often flexible to extra guests or older children. Like I recently had a clerk (oddly) complain to me that a foreign family had 8 guests in a room (they had just called to ask him for a bunch more towels). I told him that I thought they had a room occupancy limit of 4. He said that management told him not to question guests about it.
In any event, thank you to everyone who has helped me with this.