It’s quite common to see resorts tack on mandatory resort fees, but now these fees are starting to appear more in some major metropolitan cities. When it comes to NYC, the first major hotel to tack on a resort fee was the New York Hilton Midtown Manhattan Hotel, which adds a $25 mandatory charge per night.
We recently wrote how both the Sheraton New York Times Square and the Grand Hyatt New York have added mandatory $25 nightly resort fees called Destination fees. It turns out that we now see a luxury property in NYC joining this movement.
The St. Regis New York is now adding a whopping $50 nightly destination fee to all reservations, which is not waived fork Platinum members.
- Standard room rates do not include the hotel’s mandatory destination charge of 50 USD per room per night, plus local and state taxes. This charge includes:
- 50 USDÂ Food and Beverage Credit (available in all outlets)
- 50 USD Laundry/Dry Cleaning Credit
- 25 USDÂ Fodera Hair Salon Credit
- Free HSIA, Local, Long Distance and International calls (unlimited)
- 2 Museum (MOMA or Met)Â tickets per day
- 1,000 SPG points per day
Check out this list of 42 Manhattan Hotels With Resort Fees, to know which properties to avoid, if you don’t want to stay at a hotel in New York City that adds on a nightly fee.
What are your thoughts on the St. Regis adding on a nightly $50 destination fee? Do you think other luxury hotels in the market will follow?
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Disgusting. I mean seriously, who wants to visit the Met every day of your stay. Laundry etc is so overpriced and no one is going to use. Boycott!
Not for Nothing….. I would never stay at a NYC hotel that adds this $50 fee. Looking at some of the $25 fee, if I was going to be using some of the “benefits” for a an overnight or possible two night stay, I can see some possible “value”, but if I was there for business, it would be wasted.
Presuming that the above is accurate, you’re at least not getting nothing back. What I presume are 1000 extra Starpoints alone are worth somewhere in the range of $10-25 (depending on how you value them), and if you’re staying solo I think $50 in F&B credit would cover a light meal at least (even accounting for NYC hotel pricing). As to laundry/dry cleaning, yes it is overpriced (no argument there) but I wouldn’t mind being able to at least get some stuff cleaned partway through a trip within my bill.
That being said? This is a bit of a minus insofar as it is being “split off” on the bill, and IMHO if this isn’t already the law then there’s a mounting case for New York to declare these fees to be part of the taxable room rate and/or require them to be listed as part of the rate when advertised (since sliding $50 from the listed rate is a competitive advantage over other hotels). Otherwise I wouldn’t be surprised to see some rooms in that area sporting $50/night rack rates with $200 “resort fee” type charges.
TVA CEO Bill Johnson is reported to have said that the grid service charge would be 12% of TVA revenue, so it could result in doubling mandatory fees paid by TVA’s residential customers. While TVA has begun to publicly acknowledge that it has been working on the “grid service charge” concept, TVA has not yet acknowledged that it has already been facilitating a 50% increase in mandatory fees charged by local power companies. As the NAACP has stated, increasing mandatory fees has a disproportionate impact on “low-income, elderly and minority ratepayers. ” TVA Policy Drove KUB to Triple its Fees While KUB initially cut its rates to make up for the hike in the mandatory fee, this Knoxville News Sentinel graphic shows how revenue increases since 2011 have been driven by fee increases controlled by the utility. Knoxville Utilities Board (KUB) is one of at least 16 local power companies that doubled, or even tripled, mandatory fees over the past 7 or 8 years.