In the business world, you always have options as to how to conduct your business, to which most people respect those businesses that respect them. The best way to show that respect is by dealing with your customer base in an even and fair-handed method and to charge people the rate as advertised or promised without having to resort to underhanded or questionable tactics. Ideally, the more transparent business transactions are, the better the experience will be.
Over the last decade, certain hotels in certain cities, have added "resort fees" for things such as pool access, gym access, Wi-Fi access, and so forth, to which the price for these resort fees is not trivial, whatsoever. That is to say, you can easily book a hotel for what appears to be the low-low rate of $60/night only to find out that you have another $50/night in aggregate to pay for: resort fees, parking fees, taxes, cleaning fees, tourist taxes, and hotel occupancy fees. What this does, in effect, is take what you thought would be $60/night and instead increases it substantially in comparison to the true and actual cost, something that may or may be within your budget, and also something that seldom that you will be pleased to accept without feeling a bit undone by.
Hotel resort fees are especially gut-wrenching, because there are most definitely hotels that charge this fee, that on the surface, you would not expect it, because there isn't anything about the hotel that would make your believe that in a fair description of its characteristics, there would be included the word: "resort". Further to the point, even more galling, is that upon doing your initial research for the subject hotel, to which you thought that you were comparing apples to apples, you haven't been doing that at all, as hotels with resort fees do not show that resort fee as part of their advertised internet price, so while doing your comparison shopping you are invariably comparing some hotelswith resort fees that are currently obscured to you, to hotels without resort fees, and believing that when the internet pricing is about the same, that the overall price will be the same, when that definitely is not close to being true.
Those hotels that do charge resort fees, make it a point to show that on their website, after the subtotal, or upon their terms and conditions, so the resort fee is there if you are looking for it, but the advertised price per night is in bold print, which doesn't take into account those resort fees, so the consumer can easily overlook these additional fees, completely. Also, should you in fact, book the hotel through a third-party website such as Priceline or Expedia, once again, it is very easy to overlook this charge, as that website might have something written such as "hotel fee not included" which doesn't seem to really mean anything to the uninitiated, as instead it is the advertised price in bold print that garners our attention.
There isn't any doubt that resort fees work out quite well for the hotel industry as it allows them to make their nightly rate appear more competitive by matching the competition in advertised price, and then augmenting their particular price by adding in the ignominious resort fee. This means, that the resort fee isn't going away anytime soon, in fact, no doubt, the opposite is in effect, so that the consumer can expect that resort fees will become a more and more common experience, to which the consumer is stuck with fee, and wonders exactly where the resort is at.