Upgrade: Travel Better writes that hotels are using motion sensors and scales to charge you if you even move an item from your room’s minibar. Here is what one such device looks like at the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas. Say you want to check out the nutritional information on the package. Or look at it. Or you pick one up and change your mind. You could get charged an extra $100 for food you didn’t even eat. The safest bet is to just not touch the hotel minbar. Or even think about it. No doubt they’re working on sensors to detect that and charge you for it as well.
That’s just one of many annoying hidden hotel fees. Here’s 10 others and how to beat them.
Be careful not to touch anything at the Wynn Las Vegas [Upgrade: Travel Better]
(Photo: Five Hundy by Midnight Podcast)
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@mopar_man: But how do you keep your booze cold?
What I have always done is remove everything from the mini bar and place my own stuff in there. This kind of ruins my plan!
I think Hilton Waikoloa’s new system is better. They give you an empty fridge and a menu of stuff you can order for the fridge. If you order anything off the menu (i.e. $20 for a 6 pack of beer), it’s yours to keep.
@ecwis: fill an empty trash can with ice and beer. problem solved.
At a hotel in New York I was at, we were charged for several things in the mini fridge, despite not having even taken them out.
Our offense? We put a small takeout container in the fridge, apparently jostling some of the items and setting off the sensors. At least they were willing to fix the bill.
Oh, and we requested that they clean out the mini-bar to avoid such problems. “Sure,” they said, “but there’s a $25 fee to do that…”
People–this is why I stick to small, quaint local inns. Hands down friendlier service and fewer attempts to take advantage of you. And usually full kitchen access if you want to store a case of water in it as well. Think about where you’re spending your money before you spend it.
@brockmjd: I have seen a sign at a hotel desk that they will charge a daily “safe fee”, unless you tell them to remove the charge from the bill.
Las Vegas was built on, and perpetuates itself by, transferring money from people’s pockets to it’s own. By visiting, and particularly by participating in the smoke & mirrors ‘luxury’ charade that hotels like the Wynn stage, you agree to play along. Or, you are a complete fool. Either way, the money gets transferred from your pocket to theirs. There is no use in complaining – you ask for it and the city is more than happy to deliver.
Spent this past weekend in Vegas at the Venetian….SAME thing! They even warned us at check in “move it you bought it”.
This is a great example of hotels greed getting in the way of them making money.
All but the rubiest rubes know that the mini-bar is a total rip off and avoid it. I’m sure the only people who buy anything from the mini-bar are expenising it back to work or are wealthy.
Why not charge slightly inflated convenience store prices for the products and actually sell something? Personally, I would not pay $5.00 for a 4oz bottle of coke if I was a billionaire. I would however, pay $2.50 for an ice cold 20oz coke. This would still be about a 400% mark up.
Hotels make the same mistake with most of the “extras” they offer in rooms. I never even consider renting movies or video games because I know the price is crazy.
All nice hotles in Vegas have this. Bellagio, Wynn, The hotel, Mandalay. I stayed at Bellagio last year and I moved the whole dam thing, took it off no problem. As for the Venetian, it’s not a 5 star hotel like the others, it’s an over rated 3 star dive that should be closed. Screw the craptastic Venetian. If you stay in Vegas and you have money or want to pretend you do you stay at Bellagio or Wynn, end of story.
Sorry folks, but as a 15 year old teenaged bad ass with a growing curiosity towards the “finer” things in life, I left many a hotel bar filled with water where vodka or gin should have been.
I didn’t mean for this to be the outcome, so I apologize to all who’ve been charged 10 dollars for a 50 cent bag of M&Ms.
We saw the same thing in Vegas last year at Red Rock. However, the sign prominently displayed that any items removed for over 15 seconds would be charged. Just for the heck of it, we moved a few things for a couple of seconds and put them back…no charges for us.
My mom used to use the things in the minibar and then go to the grocery store to replace them. No one was the wiser. Now I guess those days are over.
*sigh*
Whenever on vacation my friends and I usually use the minibar as a fridge to store the stuff that we buy from the convenience store down the block.
We never eat the stuff from they supply us with, because we read the menu and pricing, knowing they’re going to charge $5.00 for a snickers. You’re telling me that it’s OK for them to charge us now for making space for our normal priced stuff while all of their 10x overpriced stuff is still in the fridge?
No one said ahead of time “DO NOT MOVE ANYTHING IN MINIBAR OR YOU WILL BE CHARGED FULL PRICE.”
I guess the answer now is to go buy your own styrofoam cooler at a gas station, fill it with ice from the ice machines and have your own makeshift fridge. Then keep it right next to the minibar.
@trujunglist: It’s not entirely your fault.
They can deal with people like you by simply putting tamper evident stickers on the bottles. I have seen this at many hotels. So I don’t think these Robo-Minibars are at all necessary.
@theblackdog: Even if you want the safe, you could still tell them you don’t want them to charge you. It’s not like they can remove the safe. If they can, then it’s not a safe safe.
It should be bolted down to the floor, wall, etc.
Just for the record, I stayed at The Treasure Island a little over a month ago and we didn’t even have an overpriced bottle of water sitting in the room ; ) I actually really enjoyed the hotel, except the entire mirrored wall…
But the people we were traveling with just wouldn’t believe that we didn’t have a mini-bar. They were convinced it was hidden. But I scoured that whole place looking for it when I was bored one afternoon, it didn’t exist.
Now I’m glad we were there instead of the Venetian where everybody else stayed.
Need to check not only your hotel bill but your credit card statement for that month. often these charges don’t show up at checkout but are added later. If it does show up, call and tell them where to put their $6.50 bottle of water.
@bdgbill:
Because when hotels used to do it that way years ago they lost a boat load of money on it. Even with todays price gouging they barely break even on mini bars. Most hotel managers hate the damn things and would like them removed. But upper management seems to think that they need them, and obviously some guests feel the same way because they’re still around. (former Hilton Hotel department head)
Now how about an article about ridiculous hotel phone bills!
@Sudonum:
Any business that cannot make money selling products at a 400% mark up deserves to lose money.
I stayed at the Mirage a few years ago. While going through the minibar looking at what was on offer, I discovered there was a spring-loaded switch on some bottles and IR sensors behind others.
I called down to the front desk and asked and they told me yes, it is an automatic charge, but they’d have housekeeping check it out next time they were through the room and not to worry about it.
When I went to check out, the desk clerk clearly realized I was just browsing and simply said, “Went through the minibar, did we? Let me take all those charges off.”
@bdgbill:
I don’t think that a 20oz coke at $2.50 is a “400%” mark up. However your point wasn’t lost on me, or the hotel industry, since they couldn’t make money on a “400% make up” they decided to try a 1000% mark up. Hopefully that won’t work either. But as someone once said “never over estimate the intelligence of the American public” or something like that.
@ecwis:
Heh, you’d be surprised at just how many tamper evident bottles of alcohol I tampered with and was never charged for in my roaring teens. I guess the problem the hotels have with only tamper proof bottles is that someone has to go in and check every single bottle to see if anyone did anything to it. Most of the time you can make it look like nothing was tampered with at all. So, I don’t really blame them for the robo-bars, because who knows what those darned pesky teenagers are likely to get into.
Ah, that photo was taken by Tim from the Fivehundybymidnight.com podcast.
An excellent weekly listen on everything vegas.
@k8supergrover: $4, even $CDN, is nuts. Since you work at a hotel, I can ask why it’s so expensive… you buy in bulk, so it should be cheap. Do you have a better explanation than “because we can”, or is that really it?
I had this happen to me at the Grand Hyatt in Seattle, WA we did get it off of the bill though
it was just kind of annoying how it just charges it to your bill
The good news is that soon, the economy’s dip will mean that fewer people will be filling those hotel rooms, and hotels then will be forced to drop those fees or go out of business. Personally, I hope the greedy ones go out of business.
I’ve gotten spoiled to relatively reasonable minibar charges in Germany and Austria – a half-bottle of fairly good Austrian wine was 6.50 EUR at a four-star hotel in Vienna (a full bottle would have been 6 EUR at a grocery store). 330 mL (12 oz) bottles of beer were about 2.50 – 3 EUR, which is not out of line with what a restaurant would have charged you for it.
Then again, I’d forgotten how expensive consuming any sort of alcohol you didn’t pick up at the grocery store was in the US, till I got a reminder this last Christmas visit home…
The Renaissance in Hollywood also does this. I did however successfully remove the entire contents of a Pringle’s can without actually moving the can and saved $5.
I should also add, at The Renaissance, they give you a 10 or 30-second countdown timer to replace the items before they are charged to your bill.
It’s simple. If you’re in your room, you’re not spending money in the shops, the restaurants, or at the gaming tables. You’re costing Steve Wynn money! Why are you taking food out of Steve Wynn’s grandchildren’s mouths, you sick bastard?
I always wanted to take the $6.00 bottle of water and replace the contents with tap water.
I can’t imagine paying for alcohol inside a casino/hotel in Vegas. Why would you do that? Just go downstairs, stick a quarter in a video poker machine, and wave at the next cocktail waitress who walks by. Get your favorite drink for a $1 tip.
@gokor: Keep in mind that some hotels now are including a provision that prohibits you from bringing “outside food” onto their premises – usually a document you have to sign before you get your card key to the room. If you’re caught, they reserve the right to charge you as if you had taken it from the mini bar. Heads they win, tails you lose.
I learned this lesson the hard way last year at the Paris. We had gone out to dinner and couldn’t finish all our food, so took some of it back in clamshells. The first two rows of the minibar fridge were all Paris-related chotzke items that didn’t need to be refrigerated, so I took ALL of them out (it wasn’t just a single line as there was stuff behind each item). I then replaced each one exactly where it needed to go the following day after delicious leftovers, but had a $400+ minibar bill upon checkout. Thankfully, the front desk sent someone upstairs to confirm everything was in its rightful place and the charge was reversed. Phew.