How to spot it
- The headline price has no currency of its own: it is always followed by plus fees, plus taxes, plus something.
- The total goes up at every step and never down.
- A mandatory charge is described as a fee for a service you did not ask for and cannot decline.
- Comparing two sites is impossible until the last screen of both.
- The fee has a name that sounds like a cost rather than a margin: resort, convenience, facility, processing.
Why it works on you
You commit before you know the number. By the third screen you have entered dates, names and a card, and the effort already spent makes the extra twelve percent feel smaller than starting over. This is not a failure of arithmetic, it is the sunk cost of your own attention. Splitting one large fee into four small ones works for the same reason: each is beneath the threshold where you would stop.
What to do
- Search for the total, not the nightly or per-ticket rate. Many sites now have a setting for this and default it off.
- Get two competing quotes to the final screen before choosing either. It is tedious and it is the only honest comparison.
- Treat a fee you cannot decline as part of the price, because it is.
- In the United States, live-event tickets and short-term lodging must now show the total up front. If one does not, that is reportable, not just annoying.
Where the law stands
The FTC's Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees took effect on 12 May 2025. It requires the total price, including all mandatory fees, to be shown up front, and it bans burying them later in checkout. Read the scope carefully, because it is narrower than the coverage suggested: it applies to live-event ticketing and short-term lodging, not to every industry. Elsewhere in the United States drip pricing is still handled case by case under Section 5 of the FTC Act. In the European Union the Consumer Rights Directive has long required the total price including unavoidable charges before the order is placed.
This is a description of published regulation, not legal advice, and rules in this area have changed more than once. The sources below are the primary ones.