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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

> that's how it works and it's always charged directly by the property.

If the hotel wants to charge their own fee separate from the app then that's not a problem at all. The problem is the Hotel Tonight lying about what the prices are.

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But it works that way even if you book on the hotel's own website... Or Hotels.com, Booking, whatever you want.

Just because it's being done by different companies it doesn't make it right. It's a shady way to lure customers and mislead them. They manipulate these fees in order to have a lower price displayed on the search results.

If Hotel Tonight isn't a real company because of these hidden fees, then neither are the actual hotels charging the fees. If Hotel Tonight should be in prison because of these fees, then so should the hotels actually charging them.

If you hate Hotel Tonight because of the fees, you shouldn't be staying at the hotel actually charging the fees.

> If you hate Hotel Tonight because of the fees

Once again, the issue is that HotelTonight deliberately implemented a dark pattern to hide the price. They know the fee amount. They display it. They could've shown it as part of the itemization, but they specifically did not.

Okay, hotel websites do this too? So what? TFA is about HotelTonight.

If hotels aren't disclosing these fees to HotelTonight, that's hardly HT's fault.

They are disclosing them, HT isn't including them in the prices they're showing the users though. C.f. the video I posted. What you see before I start scrolling is the entire screen that's visible to the user, with the Apple Pay button at the very bottom.

The fee is disclosed in the small print on HT. But it's not part of the total you pay to HT.

when is a fee not a fee? why isn't it included in the fee + taxes ?

That's the point we are trying to make. I don't agree with this practice. I don't agree with the "Resort Fee" practice and I'd love to learn about a hotel aggregator that doesn't do this. Any recommendation?

I dont think they exist. This is part of how the hotel stipulates its operation and listing on a website.

Edit: from a US perspective, maybe things are better over the pond.

HotelTonight doesn't collect money for this fee, only reservation + taxes.

The resort fee is charged directly by the hotel.

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