Don't forget the in-room phones.

I used those 15 or 20 years ago.

Are Gideon bibles part of the resort fee?

For you guys who are doubting / denying the lower prices charged by a la carte airlines, check out Spirit Air. They have uncomfortable seats that don't lean back, no free drinks, charge for seat assignment, even for carry on bags...but if you don't use any of those, they are MUCH cheaper than pretty much any other airlines. Like standard advance prices from most of the country to Las Vegas of $34 each way. Even lower if you buy your ticket at the airport. It's not for everyone, but not charging for the frills does make things a lot cheaper.

The next cheapest airline I know of is Southwest. Neither SW nor Spirit show up in the aggregate travel site searches so their pricing has nothing to do with that. I haven't used one of those sites for years so didn't notice any difference when the law was passed.

Whoa, that's news to me.

I would actually be willing to pay extra for the convenience of NOT having some ******* in front of me placing his greasy backhead in my lap.

I said "most people use" not "used". I am pretty sure the majority wouldn't if they still had to pay for it, but it's a service most people take advantage of since it's included in the resort fee.

They both show up on kayak.com

Huh, SW never used to show up anywhere other than their own website.

ez game.....20 hour sessions and the bell desk...you don't need a room every night!

As someone earlier in the thread mentioned... also the Mandalay Bay spa.

frontier airlines is another one. I needed a flight same day to austin and they were the only one who had a flight. $30 each way. Then they charged $60 for my one carry on bag

Good response Steve. You know exactly how to soul read people (like me)

IMO, There's very little motivation at anything under a $5 dollar blind to play anything but TAG to be honest, unless you're just there to terrorize people by stepping down and playing drunky poker.

by the way -- for the guys recommending spirit air.

I had a pretty horrific scenario with them where I had a ~1 hour flight to vegas on spirit. After being delayed for 13 hours, my flight finally took off. -- the epitomy of catching a third nut low on the river. No reasons, airline even said pretty much "what do you expect?"

I'm not here to be a nay sayer, but make your own decision. You couldnt pay me to take spirit ever again.

I wasn't exactly recommending them...while I have flown them a few times with no issues, I know they have the highest complaint rate in the business. Just saying it is possible to get a cheap basic flight, with no frills.

Yeah, that's ridiculous. Your 15 pound bag is going to cost them pennies in extra fuel, and their employees have to expend no time or effort. If you checked a bag, I suppose one could argue that employees to handle the bag might cost them a few bucks, but there's no excuse for charging for a carry on.

Spirit charges more for the carry-on bag than for a checked bag. $35 vs $30 on their longer flights IIRC..

JFC the marginal cost of transporting a bag has nothing to do with the cost they charge you.

It would be nice if Delta started charging for Carry On's. Their flights take forever to board and deplane due to all the luggage people drag on to the plane. The big rollerbags don't fit under the seats, and only fit in the overhead bins with a few minutes of lifting, grunting and rearranging.

OR they could enforce the carry on size limits they used to have years ago. Instead, the new planes are just being build with bigger overhead bins.

It is pretty awesome when they decide to enforce the carry on size limit and people get super heated and start yelling even though they aren't getting charged for checking the bag when they should.

There have always been discount and no-frills airlines (at least post-1978) that charged lower fares than the legacy carriers for bare bones service. Spirit Air's pricing structure is not unique; they've just taken it to an extreme. By focusing on them, you're missing the point. In fact, most of the airlines have gone to so-called a la carte pricing to various degrees so that makes moot your singling out of Spirit Air.

The discussion has to do with the mainstream carriers such as UA, AA, Delta, et. al., now charging fees for meals, checked luggage, etc., rather than raising general ticket prices so that their fares will appear lower on Internet websites. It's the exact same reason that hotels added resort fees rather than raising their room prices.

To boil it down further: The airlines didn't lower ticket prices when they added all of these different fees, so your premise is incorrect. They simply added fees to the existing prices, thereby increasing their income without appearing to raise prices. As is aptly demonstrated by some of the responses in this thread, this obfuscation and subterfuge succeeded in convincing some people that this was to their benefit.

Well, you can believe what you like, I just know Spirit has much lower prices than any other airline, even the other discount carriers (like SWA, which has 2 checked bags and snacks included). It is cheaper than any other airline I have ever seen, before or after any recent changes.

I don't know anything about the recent policies of the "mainstream" carriers you mention, because I haven't flown on any of them for years. I just know they were already more expensive than SWA, even without the extra charges, so no reason for anyone who wants a bargain to even look at them.

And regardless of the motives behind the changes, I think the recent unbundling of airline services is a positive change, and the bundling of things I don't want into a required resort fee is a negative one.

i'm glad someone realizes this.

and people on planes who have seats in the back but walk on and put their stuff in the overheads upfront should be sterilized

And since we're sort of on the topic, if you end up with your bag in an overhead that is behind your seat, you WAIT UNTIL EVERYONE BEHIND YOU LEAVES THE PLANE BEFORE GOING TO GET IT. No swimming upstream.

Allegiant Airline is the nuts too. Sleeping in the tunnels or in bathrooms seems to be +ev while grinding the pokers in Vegas. Sneak into the hotel showers at the pools to freshen up once a week and you should be good to go. Take the free mints at the front desk to have nice breath. Hit and run the buffets when the cashier is busy.

I wonder what the rate of change has been for international tourism in the last half decade. It's got to be a main culprit here.

Like 3 or 4 years ago I discussed this with W0XOF in his amazing OOT thread and he pretty much nailed it that the public is really only interested in bottom line pricing when endurable misery purchases are concerned. To me that includes both air travel and budget lodging. Forcing the sites to list their bottom line for basic service: bed, shower, ****ter, will affect the pricing race to the bottom for budget digs. CET and MGM would have to drop prices at their... Less attractive joints if they had to compete with others. As it is nobody can advertise much lower than 20 bucks for a room,so if the other budget locales can't undercut the two main companies then it's moot. And not like they should want to anyway. In the short term everyone is making money on this... Or it wouldn't exist. Allowing it is just allowing price gouging. It feels dirty. Like it should be illegal. Wish it was.

As far as the resort fees go - what you guys are discussing is called drip pricing. Professionalpoker made a thread about hotel resort fees in this forum on the topic. The FTC held a conference on drip pricing a few years ago, and everyone agreed it was terrible and shouldn't happen, but nothing changed.

The primary driver for this is the massive adoption of OTA (online travel agency - expedia, kayak, etc) usage for flight and hotel bookings. Combined with price being the overwhelmingly most important criteria for the average OTA user, hotels and airlines attempt to achieve better rankings in the OTA websites by advertising the lowest price possible, then adding on all kinds of fees during the booking process.

They are further incentivized to behave this way due to the commission model that the OTAs use, which is usually a percentage of the total booking. A hotel that has to pay the OTA 10% of the booking price would much rather charge $30 and add on a $30 resort fee (paying the OTA 10% of $30, or $3), than to just charge $60 (paying the OTA $6 and having a worse placing in any kind of pricing sorted search).

Yes, they do; no one is arguing that point. However, the fact that Spirit is a low-cost, no frills airline that is cheaper than any other airline is completely irrelevant to anything that is being discussed in this thread.


Coincidentally, I can give you a real-world example of the airlines obfuscation of advertised prices that is directly on point with mandatory hotel services charges. Earlier this morning, I booked a r/t flight for my wife from Miami to Cleveland for travel from Xmas to New Year's. I went to Kayak and found a very good fare (especially for relatively last-minute flights) on American Airlines. AA advertised a nonstop round-trip fare of $257.

I clicked on the flights and Kayak took me directly to aa.com to complete the booking. Once there, the same $257 price came up as I started to put in the passenger information and select the seats for the flight. The outbound flight was fine, but when I got to the return segment, there were no "free" seats available. As you may not know since you only book Spirit, many of the major carriers have started charging extra for seats in the bulkhead, emergency exit rows, and aisle & window seats in the front of the plane (and by front, I don't mean first class). The only seats available on this flight were aisle and window seats in the first 12 rows of the coach cabin. An aisle seat incurred an additional cost of $58 and a window was $53. There were no other options. My wife wanted an aisle so I clicked on a specific seat and the cost of the fare went from $257 to $315.

Now, $315 is still a decent price for booking a flight 2 days away, but I was still a little pissed that I wasn't advised until very late in the booking process that there was this added $58 fee that I could not escape. If my wife wanted to fly on this flight, she was going to have to pay this extra-added non-advertised fee.

Sound familiar?