Originally Posted by
windhund
I thought it was deceiving, but for another reason: taxes and mandatory fees (resort fees and "destination fees") aren't included in that total. I can see an argument for not including taxes, as those are generally the same within the same city. But the mandatory fees do vary, and I hate that hotels that charge them get an advantage in search results because their rate is shown as lower than it truly is. I understand un-bundling, even though I don't always like it, but the mandatory fees that aren't disclosed until later in the booking process is just a thinly veiled bait-and-switch tactic. (They won't do this, but they should at least say $XXX total, excluding required resort fee, in my opinion.)
This, except I'll go a step further and say resort fees (or any other mandatory fee not part of the total rate) should be outright illegal.
Anyway, that's another topic. This one is simply really poor design, and can be misleading in either direction. It's frustrating how Marriott's website and app have both gotten *worse* from a design/UI perspective in the past year or so. I used to really like Marriott.com with two exceptions - it was painful to filter *out* a single brand and it was painful to search multiple discount codes. But now I have a whole laundry list of things I don't like about the site.