You book a ticket with an airline or a reservation with a lodging company knowing that you will be required to pay a mandatory fee in addition to other costs. Before your flight or stay, the mandatory fee increases after you book your reservation. What do you do?
Mandatory Fee Increases After You Book Your Reservation. What Do You Do?
The answer is simple: you are not required to pay the increased fee. In fact, the airline is not allowed to raise the fare of your ticket after you purchase it; and the lodging company cannot increase its rates after you book your reservation.
Some unscrupulous lodging companies have been known to cancel reservations so that they can charge substantially higher rates to profit off of a major event.
One might argue that if no money was exchanged, then no contract exists even though an agreement between all parties exists — but adequate consideration does exist when a promisor declares a promise in return for something else…
…but regardless of the law — which I will leave to the lawyers to discuss — increasing a fee can lead to mistrust in the company by the customer. If a room rate was increased after a reservation was booked but prior to the beginning of a stay, that can be construed as a tactic known as bait-and-switch where a company can simply advertise any price it wants but then charge its customer a higher rate. Distrust in a company can cause a consumer to no longer patronize that company.
Final Boarding Call
Typically, when an airline or a lodging company increases a fare, a rate, or a required mandatory fee after you have already purchased a ticket or booked a reservation but prior to when the flight or stay begins, you generally are not required to do anything, as the company will honor what was originally offered to you…
…but never delete the copy of the acknowledgement of your ticket prior to a flight or reservation prior to a stay. That acknowledgement is proof that you and the company reached an agreement — just in case of the rare occurrence that the company attempts to charge you more money.
Now if we can just get rid of those pesky, annoying, and increasingly expensive mandatory fees — which is purportedly supposed to eventually happen…
Photograph ©2016 by Brian Cohen.
