The Resort Fee Is the Most Honest Thing in Hospitality
I am going to defend the most universally despised charge in hospitality. Not because resort fees are elegant, or well-implemented, or even particularly consumer-friendly. But because the outrage directed at them is so perfectly, spectacularly misdirected that it reveals how little most people - guests, regulators, and industry commentators alike - actually understand about hotel pricing.
The resort fee is the only charge on your hotel bill that tells you what it pays for. Every other cost - franchise fees, OTA commissions, credit card processing, insurance, capital reserves - is buried invisibly inside your room rate. You never see them. You never question them. And yet the one fee that comes with an itemised list is the one everybody wants to burn at the stake.
The irony is not subtle.
What USD 35 Actually Buys
A resort fee at a legitimate resort property typically covers: pool and fitness centre maintenance and staffing, Wi-Fi infrastructure, beach equipment and towel service, shuttle or transport, business centre access, in-room coffee and bottled water, and digital media or newspaper access.
These are not fictional line items. A 200-room resort with a pool, fitness centre, Wi-Fi network, and shuttle service incurs USD 350,000 to USD 500,000 annually maintaining these amenities, according to cost data from the American Hotel & Lodging Association's 2024 operating cost survey. That is USD 4.80 to USD 6.85 per occupied room night just to break even - before staff, before capital replacement, before the inevitable repaving of the pool deck every six years.
The Ritz-Carlton Kapalua in Maui charges a USD 50 resort fee. Their amenities include two championship golf courses, a 10,000-square-foot spa facility, coastal hiking trails, cultural programmes, multiple pool areas, and beach services. The annual operating cost of those amenities exceeds USD 12 million. The resort fee covers a fraction of it. The rest is subsidised by the room rate - which, to be fair, starts at USD 800 and can absorb the subsidy.
But for a mid-market resort in Scottsdale or Cancun charging USD 250 per night, the maths is tighter. The amenities still cost what they cost. A USD 35 fee that covers demonstrable, real services is not greed. It is cost recovery with a receipt attached.
The "Just Bundle It" Argument Collapses Under Scrutiny
Every resort fee critic offers the same solution: eliminate the fee and roll it into the room rate. It sounds reasonable until you examine what actually happens.
OTA sort order punishes bundled pricing. Booking.com, Expedia, and Google Hotels sort results primarily by displayed room rate. A hotel charging USD 294 with a bundled fee appears more expensive than a hotel charging USD 259 plus a USD 35 resort fee - even though the total cost is identical. Kalibri Labs' 2024 analysis of over 8 million hotel bookings found that hotels with higher displayed base rates (due to bundled fees) experienced 8 to 12 percent lower OTA conversion rates in competitive markets. The platform literally punishes the hotel that does what critics demand.
I have seen this play out in real time. A resort group in Florida eliminated their USD 30 resort fee in 2023 and raised base rates by USD 30 to compensate. Within four months, their Booking.com conversion rate dropped 11 percent. Their Expedia ranking fell an average of 6 positions in their local market. They reinstated the fee within eight months. The experiment cost them an estimated USD 340,000 in lost revenue.
Commission maths amplifies the penalty. OTA commissions are typically calculated on the room rate, not on resort fees. A USD 259 rate with a USD 35 non-commissionable resort fee means the hotel pays 20 percent commission on USD 259, or USD 51.80 per night. A USD 294 bundled rate means commission on USD 294, or USD 58.80 per night. The difference - USD 7 per room night - goes directly to the OTA.
On a 200-room hotel at 75 percent occupancy with 55 percent OTA share, that is an additional USD 210,000 per year in OTA commissions. For the privilege of complying with what critics call "transparency." The OTAs are the primary beneficiaries of fee bundling, which is precisely why they have lobbied for it so aggressively.
Behavioural anchoring works against you. Consumers anchor on the displayed rate. A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research (Morwitz, Greenleaf, and Johnson, 2014) found that partitioned pricing - showing a base price with separate fees - actually increases purchase likelihood when the base price is competitive, because consumers evaluate the initial number and treat supplementary fees as secondary information. This is not a bug in human cognition. It is a feature that every airline, ticketing platform, and car rental company already exploits.
The Charges Nobody Gets Angry About
While resort fees attract op-eds and congressional inquiries, here is what is embedded invisibly in every hotel room rate without a murmur of protest:
Franchise fees: 8 to 12 percent of room revenue at every chain hotel. On a USD 259 room, that is USD 20 to USD 31 going to the brand owner for the right to use their name and reservation system. You will never see this line item. It is baked into the rate and treated as an operating cost.
OTA commissions: 15 to 25 percent on third-party bookings, passed through to you as a higher rate than the hotel would otherwise need to charge. The guest who books through Booking.com is subsidising the commission through an inflated rate - but nobody calls that a "hidden fee."
Credit card processing: 2.5 to 3.5 percent on every transaction. Embedded in the rate. Never disclosed.
Capital reserve contributions: 4 to 6 percent of revenue set aside for future renovations. Embedded in the rate. Never disclosed.
Property tax and insurance: Variable, significant, entirely invisible.
Add these up and your USD 259 room rate includes over USD 100 in charges that have nothing to do with the room, the bed, or the service. The resort fee is the only additional charge on the bill that comes with a list of what it covers. It is being punished for being visible while invisible charges get a free pass.
Where Resort Fees Become Indefensible
I am not arguing that all resort fees are justified. Some are insulting, and the industry deserves criticism for the worst examples.
A "facility fee" at a limited-service highway hotel is extractive. When a Holiday Inn Express near a motorway junction charges USD 25 for "Wi-Fi and fitness centre access" - where the "fitness centre" is a closet with a treadmill and a busted elliptical - that is not cost recovery. That is a rate supplement disguised as a fee. Wi-Fi should be free everywhere in 2026, full stop.
A "destination fee" at an urban hotel with no resort amenities is dishonest. A USD 45 destination fee at a Manhattan hotel that includes "local phone calls, daily newspaper, and fitness centre access" is an insult to the word "destination." Nobody makes local calls from hotel rooms. Nobody reads a physical newspaper. A gym smaller than a studio apartment is not an amenity worth itemising. These properties deserve the backlash they receive.
Any fee not disclosed before the booking is confirmed is deceptive. If the guest does not see the fee at the same point where they see the room rate - not in footnotes, not in a confirmation email, but in the primary price display - that is a bait-and-switch. No defence applies.
The distinction matters. A USD 35 resort fee at a Hilton Hawaiian Village with seven pools, a beach, a spa, a lagoon, and daily cultural activities is a fundamentally different proposition from a USD 25 "amenity fee" at an airport hotel with a vending machine and a parking lot. Treating them as the same thing - which most critics do - makes the conversation stupid.
The FTC Push and the Level Playing Field That Does Not Exist
The FTC's "Junk Fee Prevention Act" targets hotel resort fees with mandatory all-in pricing. The principle is sound. I support price transparency. But the implementation is selectively punitive.
As of 2026, airlines are not required to include baggage fees in their displayed fares. Ticketmaster is not required to include service fees upfront. Car rental companies add insurance, fuel charges, and airport surcharges after the base rate is displayed. Airbnb only recently started showing total price including cleaning fees in search results - and their cleaning fees can add 30 to 50 percent to the displayed nightly rate.
If all-in pricing is applied only to hotels while every other travel and entertainment sector continues with partitioned pricing, the result is not consumer protection. It is a competitive disadvantage for one industry segment. A USD 294 all-in hotel rate competes in search results against a USD 180 Airbnb that becomes USD 295 after cleaning and service fees at checkout. The consumer sees USD 294 versus USD 180 and books the Airbnb. That is not informed decision-making. It is price theatre.
Apply all-in pricing to every consumer-facing booking platform - airlines, hotels, Airbnb, event tickets, car rentals - and you have genuine reform. Apply it only to hotels and you have optics.
What Would Actually Fix This
Mandatory total-price display at the point of search. Not the room rate. The total per-night cost including all mandatory fees. Every platform, every booking channel, every search result. This is achievable - Google Hotels already displays total prices. OTAs could do it tomorrow if regulators required it.
Amenity-backing requirements for resort fees. A property must offer qualifying amenities (pool, beach access, spa, shuttle, or equivalent) above a defined threshold to charge a resort fee. Limited-service hotels with a treadmill and free coffee do not qualify.
Opt-out provisions for bundled services. If the resort fee includes parking and I arrive by taxi, let me opt out of parking. Unbundle where unbundling is possible.
Consistent regulation across all travel sectors. Hotels, airlines, Airbnb, car rentals, event tickets - same rules. If the goal is transparency, it cannot be selective.
So What Box
The resort fee is not the problem. It is a symptom of a distribution ecosystem that punishes transparent pricing. Eliminating it makes hotel pricing less visible, not more. The real fixes are systemic: total-price display across all channels, amenity-backing requirements, and consistent regulation that does not single out hotels while giving every other travel sector a pass.
Kicker
The resort fee is ugly. But it is the one charge honest enough to tell you what it pays for. Everything else on your hotel bill just hopes you do not ask.
