Ed Perkins on Travel: California Bans Junk Fees—Big Win for Consumers

No hidden fees—the price you see is the price you pay.

Junk Fees inscription on the piece of paper. Dreamstime/TNS

Last Saturday, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed an historic bill: The Consumers Legal Remedies Act: advertisements prohibits “drip pricing,” which means “advertising a price that is less than the actual price that a consumer will have to pay for a good or service.” It adds such advertising into the cluster of offenses that California classes as “unfair competition” and “false advertising.” In short, the law says, “Ya gotta show the full price.” It will go into effect next July. And those existing laws authorize consumers to bring action and sue for damages resulting from false advertising.

The gold standard in price advertising is, as I’ve often stated in a trope dating back to early word processors, “What you see is what you pay,” or WYSIWYP. The new bill doesn’t quite make that standard:

• Airlines are exempted, because the Deregulation Act exempts them from all state regulation. But that doesn’t matter here; the Department of Transportation (DoT) already requires full-fare airline advertising.
• It allows sellers to exclude taxes and fees imposed by a government on the transaction. Mainly, this means state and local sales taxes.
• For no clear reason, the bill excludes rental car price advertising. Again this is not a serious omission, given that almost all of the various metasearch systems allow you to select all-up prices when you search and compare.

Most of the travel blogosphere’s attention is focused on mandatory hotel fees—fees such as “resort,” “destination,” or “facility” fees that so many hotels now exclude from the prices they feature in advertisements and post on search engines. The Hilton, Hyatt, and Marriott chains are already starting to display full-rate prices on their own websites. But they still post the phony pre-fee prices to external search engines. And so far Best Western, Choice, IHG, and many independent hotels have stuck with the deception. For the most part, the metasearch engines have abdicated their honest display responsibilities by continuing to post initial comparisons based on false prices.