The golden rule of fees: if there are no circumstances under which you won't be charged the fee, then it should instead be incorporated into the base price. This sort of deception should be illegal.
Even if the thing is always expected it should be in the price. Like "gratuities". Just insane, that there is expected level and it is not included and paid through by company by default.
Is there a "food safety fee" for following food safety requirements? Is there a "this building has adequate fire suppression" fee? This is basically a "we follow local labor laws" fee.
The cost of business increasing is not the issue here, although some people here may feel strongly about that. Passing that increase on as a fee is the deception we're discussing.
The cost of doing business should be baked into the overall nightly rate, (which is algorithmic and highly variable already, so there is no excuse not to) so that the price is upfront to the consumer and hotels can be compared apples to apples, rather than the consumer having to unravel whatever hollywood accounting scheme each hotel comes up with to make their rate appear as low as possible.
I don't like the idea of the price of a service being increased during checkout, but it's good that people are shown what part of the price that they pay goes to complying with regulations, city taxes, etc - that information allows them to vote better.
That’s so naive, who says how much complying with labor laws costs? A business owner will lie and say it cost two times as much to gain advantage. Business owners should charge an up front price and if they can’t survive because they’re following the law then they can shut down and find a job. Owning a business isn’t a right bestowed by god.
Yeah and even for the actual taxes this justification is untrue anyway. Nobody hides the price do that users will be like “Oh good, Marriott is treating me right but that damn government is making them add a tax,” they do it to get you past the first few decision points and correctly expect many will just admit defeat on the checkout page.
> who says how much complying with labor laws costs?
Basic accounting? If you used to pay $X for something and a new tax goes into effect that makes it $X * 5% tax, you can hide that into the overall price or be transparent to your customers about why your prices are increasing.
> they can shut down and find a job
Love it. The financial equivalent of "Why should I care about farmers? I buy my food at the store".
> Owning a business isn’t a right
If you're not allowed to independently make a living, but must be a wage slave for a different entity, then none of your other fundamental human rights really matter. The right to start your own business is one of the most fundamental human rights.
>who says how much complying with labor laws costs?
When you run an otherwise stable business and have records going back far enough it's pretty easy to see the "cost" of a any given change in how you run things especially if that change has a labor/materials impact that is pretty isolated and countable.
I am really glad in Australia companies aren't typically allowed to advertise prices ex taxes / fees. They are allowed to mention the costs as a line item, but can't advertise only part of the cost (i.e. if they advertise its a $89 room, you need to be able to get it for $89)
Thankfully we have great consumer laws in Australia. This is referred to as drip pricing. It also makes practices such as mandatory minimum tips illegal, which would make someone from the US’s head spin.
The only case I can think of where there is a mandatory minimum tip in the US is that a lot of restaurants will charge a minimum gratuity for parties larger than 6-8.
To put it explicitly: if you don't tip, you're personally choosing for that person to make as little as $2.13 an hour for that transaction. Most would balk at pulling that lever.
Well, you are actually pushing their wage downward, but not to $2.13. The lowest would be the minimum wage of the area since the company is required by law to make up the difference.
SF is full of these. Every restaurant bill will have some SF Healthcare Ordinance or something else on it. Now that would be a useful proposition: all visible prices must have local taxes and fees built-in. We all know everything is going to switch to the tip entry, though. A tip for directing you to the self-checkout, no doubt.
Am I missing something? The article text suggests these are "mandatory fees and surcharges that are not included in the headline price", but all the screenshots from Marriott's site show the all-in total, inclusive of the fees, when you're searching, and then break down the elements of that price when you pay.
Even if nothing were being hidden, there's still the issue that the hotels make you pay these sorts of junk fees even when you're supposed to be getting the room for free with points.
I used the Marriott app inside the US and what I found is that you have to specifically select the price to include everything. By default it is the rate without all other required items (e.g. tax). Maybe this is the difference?
The title made me think people were leaving trash in their hotel rooms (quickly resolved by visiting and reading it)
I wonder if you would get billed for forgetting your CRTs / tyres / hazardous waste / bags of asbestos when you checked out, if that was not explicitly in the contract...
I don't know the details but if this fee is required even for rewards redemptions, is it a local tax? If so .. i wouldn't necessarily expect tax to be included in the rate.
What's stupid about the law? Do you perhaps have experience in hospitality in the LA area and/or can help illuminate the situation for us, so as to try to persuade us of your opinion?
Here's a summary of the ordinance for anyone who's not familiar:
Doesn't seem that stupid to me as a layperson, reading through it. I'm curious what you see at issue here.
There's even a one-year waiver available for financial hardship, and it appears some or all of the protections could be waived under a collective bargaining agreement.
A bit of online research suggests that hotel staff that were sexually harassed/assaulted at work and subsequently not taken seriously by their management, or not allowed to file a police report on 'company time', were primary originators of the push for this ordinance.
The rest of the law focuses on things like: any work over 10 hours in one day is voluntary. Hmm, I wonder why that is necessary?
It doesn't seem like a tax. You wouldn't call a state government requiring a car to meet some minimum safety requirement a tax, right? At least to the best of my knowledge, no automaker has ever done an "airbag tax".
It's just a political ploy to garner some ill will against regulators and make a few bucks in the process. Seems pretty genius (in a nefarious way) to me.
If you look into it the primary intent of the ordinance is to ensure hotel workers can get help fast if they are assaulted in the course of their job, and the secondary intent is to prevent them from being overworked without consent.
Which makes this ploy especially distasteful in my eyes - bit of a "the city made us make your servants feel safe and valued at work" fee.
Do you seriously think any company is ever going to give you a fully accurate and itemised bill, that identifies which costs were incurred because of legal compliance, which costs were incurred in the pursuit of profit, which costs are pay and benefits for employees, which costs were incurred to acquire consumable resources etc? This is not how ordinary businesses act, and it's dishonest to imply that that's all they're doing here.
