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Dean Prager's avatar

A new one is high end restaurants adding a "3% fee for the healthcare of the staff" or something that they say they're happy to waive. All you have to do is tell your lovely single mother professional waitress that you specifically want to waive the payment for her health-care

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Erick's avatar

Mandating bundling of flight fares is a terrible idea. This terrible logic turns up in a lot of places where people think the dollar cost is the problem, but the real problem is availability. Families are not worse off having to pay to sit together, they are BETTER off. It is not a major problem for me to pay a little bit more to pick adjacent seats for my family. Typically the cost for seat choice in regular coach is very cheap, even $30 per seat for a cross-country flight.

What is a major problem for a family trying to fly together is not being able to find adjacent seats available at all. With seat choice costing money, people who care about their seat have many empty seats to pick, because a lot of passengers will be randomly assigned at the last minute. This is a terrible area for government to legislate. The people have spoken with regard to flight fares. A small minority may bitch and moan, but what actually happens is people flood to the cheap crap service because what they want is cheap service. If you want the fancy service, you can still get it. People just think they can give it for free and garbage politicians encourage that belief for votes.

I mean seriously, how dumb is this argument? It's not fair for people to pay $30 on top of their $200 fare to pick their seat. So we'll mandate a $230 fare with free seats. The best you can twist that is to say well we're probably only mandating $220 seats, so see it's a $10 benefit for this group over here that we think might vote for us.

None of this is hidden. I have no idea how someone can buy a flight ticket and be unaware of what is not bundled. Spirit literally has giant yellow popups that tell you at each stage.

Resort fees I can find no justification for. In theory they might be a way to differentiate their "resort" services, but hotels use crap like free phone calls to justify them, as if anyone has used a hotel phone to make a call in the last 15 years. I think the hysteria over them is certainly not justified though. I can't think of anywhere I've made a reservation where it wasn't disclosed at the time of booking. A surprise when you show up at the hotel may be fraud, a surprise when you click through a list of options is an annoyance. It's the kind of thing the government should probably stay out of, and people should fix it by patronizing sites that are better at disclosing them. Marriott lets you choose if you want the all inclusive price, or just the base price (I do find the base price search useful, though it's a niche use, and only because resort fees are a thing).

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