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Legal thievery: The scams & rip-offs built into nearly every hotel bill
Most major hotel chains don't want you to know their industry's dirty little secret: they will rob you blind, and they even do it with your permission
Yes, this bottle of water being provided "as a service to our guests" in a San Juan, Puerto Rico hotel costs a mere $7. Now that's what I call service! (Tip: suck it out of the tap in the bathroom sink ten feet way and it's free.)
I have nothing against hotels, but some of their common charging practices are so sneaky as to almost qualify as criminal. Almost.
This page is not about outright theivery—that rare front-desk clerk who will try to slip in an extra night's charge on unsuspecting guests (in 20 years of European travel, that's happened to me precisely once).
All of the rip-offs listed below are prefectly legal; they're just not very nice. And, I should point out, by a huge margin
it tends to be the pricier establishments that do this,
not so much (or at least less flagarently) the smaller mom and pop joints, where extra charges are often nominal and quite reasonable.
Many hotels, though, try to squeeze every Euro they can out of you beyond the cost of the room. Because, hey: once you're booked in, you're bound to get thirsty and give into the temptation of that Coke in the minibar, or want to phone some great-sounding restaruant to make reservations for the evening or (God forbid) make a quick call home, or you may eventually want to, you know, eat breakfast or something. And then they have you.
Let the fleecing of the unawares begin!
There are
six main hotel rip-offs:
the minibar, the telephone, the parking garage, breakfast, the laundry service, and taxes.
The Minibar
Seven bucks for a can of Coca-cola? A fiver for a miniature can of Pringles? Yep, that about sums it up. The minibar: minting money for the hotel industry since the early 1980s (if you're looking for someone to blame, it was supposedly invented at the Westin Ottawa).| TIP |
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Beware the False Minibar Charge |
Seriously folks, just say no. Simply push aside the overpriced peanuts and $4 bottle of tap water so you can use the minbar as a minifridge for the couple of sodas or beers you grabbed at the local grocery store and to store your picnic purchases. But, for heaven's sake, just leave the teensy bottles of liquor alone.
The Phone
This one's simple: hotels charge obscenely high telephone rates—we're talking markups anywhere from 150% to 400%—especially on long-distance calls. As usual, the more expensive the establishment, the higher the mark-up (often, modest little cheap hotels will only charge you the same price as a payphone, which is very stand-upish of them).
Many hotels will even charge you for what should be a "toll free" local call so you can use your calling card! Their totally indefensible excuse for this bit of theivery is that you are tying up one of their outgoing lines, and so should be charged for the usage, when really they're just miffed that they're missing out on the chance to gouge you big-time for an overseas call.
I have a simple rule: just pretend the hotel phone doesn't exist and use pay phones or the post office instead.
Parking
OK, that'll be $70 for your room, and $40 a day for parking... Sound familiar? All of a sudden, you're looking at a triple-digit daily charge just for you and your wheels to spend the night. With rare expections, hotel parking (whether on-site or using a local garage) costs far more than the municipal garage or lot. I've actually run into places charging $60 a night, just for the car!
The catch, of course, is that if you do pick the public garage/lot, you have to then shuttle yourself between the hotel and said lot—and the most reasonable lots (ones costing under $20 for 24 hours) are usually on the edges of town.
Then again, keep in mind that most European cities have crazy traffic, arcane driving rules, narrow streets, and a mind-bogglingly large percentage of one-way or pedestrian-only roads, and suddenly paying a bit extra to just get rid of the car at your hotel door starts looking pretty tempting.
Contact the tourist office or look in your guidebook to find out the going rate at the city garage, and then ask your hotel what their charge would be, as well as whether it's on-site (garage, lot, or just a few spaces on the streets around the hotel) and DIY, or if it's nearby and requires a valet (and, if so, how much that service costs).
Oh, another random tip: if it is on-street parking (the case with many smaller, cheaper hotels), make sure you tell them you have a car when checking in and exactly where you parked it; the desk clerk will know whether you're in a legal space, and whether he needs to give you a special temporary "residents" parking disc so you can run down and stick on your dashboard before getting ticketed.
Back to garages: Long experience—and much driving frustration—has taught me that, unless you're carefly scrimping on every penny, if the hotel's parking only costs up to about $10 more than the municipal lot, it's worth it if only to relieve yourself of the hassle. If the difference is significatly more than that (which it often is), well, then it's up to your take on how much extra time versus money you have to spend, and how wiliing you are to get (ahem) taken for a ride on the parking fee.
>> Hotel Rip-offs & Scams continues...
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This material was last updated July 2006. All information was accurate at the time.
Copyright © 1998-2008 by Reid Bramblett. All rights reserved.
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