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Hotel scams & rip-offs (cont'd)
Breakfast
A continental breakfast in Europe usually consists of little more than plain rolls, packaged jelly, and a cappuccino. Mmm, all that bounty for a mere $13. What a deal! If you can, try to get out of paying extra for a lame breakfast and hit a nearby cafe for a much cheaper breakfast alongside the locals.
A hotel breakfast usually costs anywhere from $5 to $25 per person, so if you have the option of opting out and getting some of that amount knocked off your hotel bill, you should do so.
Except in British B&Bs, some farm stays, or a Scandinavian smorgasbord, breakfast normally consists of croissants and/or rolls, maybe some packaged jams, coffee or tea, and some sort of weird European orange drink that tastes likes an early (and, thankfully, discarded) formula for Tang; it's wet, sweet, and vaguely orangey, but it certainly ain't juice.
Heck, you can get the same "hotel breakfast" (minus the definitely-not-Tang) from the corner cafe for $3 or less. Plus, if you patronize the neighborhood joint, you get the chance to rub elbows at the bar with locals on their way to work rather than share a hotel breakfast in a room filled with other tourists. Only on very rare occasions and in the very cheapest hotels do they charge you as little for breakfast as the local cafe would.
Now I know that some hotels lay on a much more impressive spread—slices of ham, cheese, teensy boxes of cold cereal, even hot prepared foods like eggs and grilled breakfast meats (either of which is a sure sign the hotel is catering to Americans who woudl rather not be in a foreign country after all)—but even that is truly not worth the added expense. Skip it, hit the local bar, and get on with your day quickly and, dare I say, more authentically.
I
do, of course, make exception for the occasional full fry-up in Britain or Ireland, those hearty farm breakfasts, and the Swedish smorgasbord. Not for every morning, mind you (your cholesterol count probably couldn't take it), but on occasion.
If, however, your hotel insists that breakfast is included in the rate and you cannot opt out, then you have carte blanche to bring your daypack down to breakfast with you and load it up with enough extra food to make at least a decent mid-morning snack if not a light picnic lunch out of it. After all, the hotel did insist, and you are paying through the nose for it (just don't be obvious about it; for some reason, they seem to frown upon this act of nonviolent protest).
Laundry
No, those aren't the prices to buy those particular items of clothing. That's how much this hotel is charging merely to wash them.
This is the biggest rip-off at the hotel. Oh, sure, the phone charges are the most insidious—cause the phone is one of life's daily necessities, plus unlike with minbar or laundry, they don't warn you with a price list first—but in terms of outright overcharging, the laundry just might be the worst.
Just take a look at the list to the left, taken from a hotel in Tuscany. Those prices are in Euro, so that means that, at the current exchanges rate of €1 = $1.31, it would cost $3.28 per piece to have a t-shirt or pair of pants washed, or $5.90 for a dress. Heck, they're even charging $1.31 for a pair of socks or a pair of underwear. And that's just to wash them. They'd come back to you still sopping wet!
OK. Let's assume you followed my packing list, and that you are going to wear one set of clothes while washing the rest—and that you won't bother washing the sports coat or sweater you brought alone for warmth and style. That means, to wash a single load of travel laundry (pair of pants, pair of shorts you used to swim in, two T-shirts, a long-sleeved shirt, a skirt, and three pairs each of socks and undies) it would cost about $27.50. Heck, in a Queens laundromat it only costs me $1.25 for the washer and another $1 or so for the dryer for a load that small.
The solution? Two choices. One is to seek out a European laundromat, either coin-op, or a place that does it for you—though watch out for the latter, as they usually also charge by the piece (if not quite so much). You want to find one that charges by weight. Either way, expect to pay less than €10 ($13) to wash and dry your clothes. Bonus: many European laundromats now double as cybercafes. (Actually, there are some hotels—guess which kind?—which will do your laundry for a nominal fee about equal to what a local laundromat costs.).
The truly frugal option is to do your own laundry in the bathroom sink. Get some cheap, biodegradable washing solution, such as Campsuds, and a braided clothesline (both available at camping/luggage stores and through travel catalogs), and be prepared to do a bit of washing up each night before hitting the sack.
Hang the wet clothes to dry overnight; on the balcony if you have one and it's warm, over the radiator in winter (I stuff socks and unies in the radiator cracks, then drape shirts and pants over the top).
I have yet to meet the hotelier who could satisfactorily explain exactly why they don't want you to do laundry in the bathroom sinks. One once mumbled something about lint clogging the drains, but that sounded pretty lame to me. My vote: forget the stupid sign and go ahead wash out your skivvies in the sink. Ninety seconds of scrubbing and wringing them out sure beats paying $3 just for a clean pair of underwear.
I usually do this for about two weeks at a spell before taking the lot of it to a laundromat to get a more thorough washing.
The only problem is, lots of hotels don't like you doing this (uses up hot water, plus I'm sure the lint collects to clog the drains), and some even post nasty little signs in the bathroom scolding you against the practice. To me, that just means I have to be sneakier about it and can't leve the stuff hanging in the room all day for the maids to find.
Taxes
Always ask if taxes are included in the hotel quote. In much of Europe, this is not an issue as the country's VAT—the Value Added Tax, sort of like a national sales tax—is automatically folded into the sticker price, as it were.
However, there are a few countries where they might set the room rates before taxes and then tack on the extra when it comes time to pay the bill. There's nothing illegal about this at all, just a bit sneaky, and as with so many other hidden or inflated charges, the pricier the hotel is, the more likely it is to leave the tax out of its posted rates.
Look out for extra hotel taxes especially in Spain (7%) and France (it varies depending on the hotel's star rating), as in both countries it's fairly standard to quote hotel prices without taxes. It happens much less frequently, but with rather more dramatic results, in Britain (where the tax is a whopping 17.5%) and the more expensive properties in the Czech Republic (where you may find a 22% headache waiting for you at the end of your stay).
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This article was last updated in July 2006. All information was accurate at the time.
Copyright © 1998–2010 by Reid Bramblett. All rights reserved.
