Talk:Hidden Costs

You can add RyanAir again here. The advertised prices are never correct, and then when you go to pay with any card they will add an extra processing fee at the very last moment.

Most travel sites annoyingly do this. Although Expedia gives you the total fee upfront, other sites like Orbitz and Travelocity don’t.

Also, I just recently renewed my ACM membership and almost paid triple the amount because they automatically added two $100 charges for extra services I never elected. I wish I would have saved a screenshot for you.

This is so prevalent that I don’t know how to react to it anymore. Buying football tickets, there’s always a surcharge added towards the end at about 10%. Sometimes when I’ve bought flight tickets, there’s a credit card payment fee, but with no other option of paying on the site it’s quite annoying. Shipping is a bit more tricky, how to know the shipping fee before you’ve given your delivery address? ikea.com has a zipcode field which in some countries is optional at the first step of the checkout process, in some countries you can’t go further until you’ve filled it out

Rather hard to argue that this is really design pattern in the currently accepted sense. It’s more of a commercial tradition (like expecting tips). But I agree it’s wrong.

Slightly different here I reckon – as people in the USA are used to taxes and charges added to a bill when you come to pay – the price you see for a Mars Bar and of Coke in the shops, is not the price you pay at the till.

But annoying for a UK customer!

Parking lots have started doing this in the states. They list the fee for however many hours (0-2hrs, 2-4hrs, etc) but when you get to the pay station, there will be a very small note saying that. On top of this you will be charged an extra 10% for “parking fee” as well as an extra 10% for tax. RIDICULOUS.

It is illegal in the USA to charge a credit card usage fee. On a mainstream website, you shouldn’t feel bad about taking a screenshot and then complaining to the credit card company for a refund of the fee.

Firstly…Great site, Harry!

There are two main issues with “Hidden Costs”:
-Not knowing that there will be extra costs in the first place.
-What the extra costs actually cost you.

For the first issue, this is where companies should ensure their sites are as transparent as possible to avoid making customers feel cheated.
For the second issue, it is more complicated. I recently got charged £12 fee for booking an Easyjet flight with my AMEX. That is steep!

Referring back to the example given, I must say that ALL US hotels will charge a tax on top of their nominal rate, so anyone travelling in the States shouldn’t be surprised by this. Other countries also do the same (I remember Hong Kong being similar?). An easy and more honest way around this would be to add a ‘plus local taxes’ note below the nominal rate on the first page. This would allow them to compare prices based on their nominal rate, however be more transparent for those countries that do add extra taxes.

Regarding ‘extra guest charges’, if you put a reservation in for three people (in one room), I feel it is more than fair for the third person to pay an ‘extra guest fee’.
This shouldn’t really come as a surprise to the user either, and in this specific example, localised help is also available.
Again, it is a difference between nominal price and real cost, and this is what needs to be clearer.

I do feel there are many other sites out there that do a much worse job than the Hotels.com example given. I have used Hotels.com for several bookings recently and find it to be one of the more elegant solutions available, and with competitive prices too. Backing this up with a UK-based phone number and being sent a text with all your booking details works a treat for me.

Anybody have any examples of better solutions/experiences they can share as opposed to just complaining?

Ryhs,

I agree hotels.com is great in other areas, and their UX is generally outstanding. I suspect they use the hidden costs dark pattern because all their competitors do – and if they showed total prices up front, they would lose business – users would get price shock and switch to cheaper *looking* sites.

In the top screengrab above, the search results show one price, but when the users clicks “book” another higher price is shown on the payment page (see the bottom screengrab). The user has not entered any new data – the site simply hid the additional costs to entice the user deeper into the site.

While this may be a standard practice, it is purposefully deceptive. “Normal” is not equivalent to “right”.

Fair comments, Harry.

Still keen to see some examples of people/companies who have nailed this one, though.

Any thoughts?

VAT. Funny how this is left off those tempting offers at Travelodge who are trying to become Ryanair of the duvets.

Haha, I’m at a point where I just add 10% or 15% to my Ticketmaster price in my head because I know those charges will appear before I finish the purchase process.

Terrible.

Australian airlines.
Tiger
DJ
QF
JQ

But we have new rules where the advertised price has to include taxes and fuel surcharges.

Same for telcos in Australia.

Shytsters, the lot of them.

The Edinburgh Fringe website did this to me when I was buying tickets to a play. It didn’t even say what the extra money was for – it just said ‘Fee’ (I assumed it meant ‘profiteering fee’).

The thing that annoys me about these fees is that they’re so arbitrary – it’s generally cheaper to let people buy online than over the phone or in person.

I want to inform you that the ‘Screw you ticket master’ post appeared on reddit.com first as ‘Fuck you ticketmaster. That is all’ and was done by a user called blankwall.

BMIBaby. Oh god. Saw a flight for 3 pounds, ended up paying 50. The prices on the list pages of these budget airlines are not even remotely close to what you end up paying.

Try Air Canada’s international flights, where the fare might be $175 and the “fuel surcharge” is more like $400.

In example 1, as long as the fees are clearly stated in the very next click, I don’t have too much problem with them. The main thing is that I like to be able to quickly compare apples to apples, and all travel websites should post their prices in the same way (all upfront or all on the next page). Honest websites who post the full rate upfront risk having their customers go to another company’s website, thinking the rate is too high.

Amazon.co.uk does this to Finnish customers. They are required to pay Value Added Tax to Finland, and the Finnish VAT percentage is higher than the UK one. They don’t show the higher price immediately when you enter a Finnish address, although they do calculate the shipping costs based on the address – it is only on the final “confirm your order” page that the higher tax is shown.

The airline flybe sneaks charges for SEATS into the basket. As if a seat on a flight is optional. And they charge again for each leg of the journey.

They also hide carry-on baggage so it appears you need to pay for it when you do not.

Particularly bad when they trumpet fair and transparent pricing and ‘pay only for what you need’.

Ticketmaster’s “convenience” and other fees are the absolute most frustrating. They know that you have no other option to purchase tickets (most large concert venues have exclusive deals with them) and so they can tack on whatever charges they want.

It’s even more galling when the ‘handling’ and ‘convenience’ are simply allowing you to print the tickets on your own computer. No ticket ever gets ‘handled’ by anyone at Ticketmaster in that case. It’s pure price gouging.

We’re planning a trip to Niagara Falls (Canadian-side) & the Hotels not only have the usual hospitality taxes, but they also have an advert/promo tax! They charge you for them advertising to get you to come & stay there! Blatant; but easy to miss if you’re not looking!

They will send you promotional material in your local currency (AUD) then let you go through the whole ordering process in your local currency until the very last accept purchase page when they switch to some EURO value. Added AUD50 to my purchase and even with multiple emails refuse to refund or credit the difference.

The clock on the ticketmaster website also creates an air of urgency – this seems pretty nasty considering session length is completely flexible… I would imagine it is there to discourage users from actually reading the page.