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A few Marriott hotels in Southern California have added another fee to their nightly rates.
The fee appears to be limited to a couple of hotels near the airport. This move could be a sign of things to come for hotels in Los Angeles. Resort fees were small before they were large.
The Los Angeles Airport Marriott and the Renaissance Los Angeles Airport Hotel now charge a daily hotel worker protection surcharge. The fees ranged from $8.70 at the Renaissance to $10.72 at the Marriott according to an initial report from One Mile at a Time.
The fee is believed to be in response to the Los Angeles Mayor signing a law last summer that mandated hotel owners provide employees with personal panic button devices. In hotels with more than 45 rooms, hotels have to pay workers a premium wage for heavy workload.
It is possible that this is a sign of what will show up on your hotel bill as a result of increased labor regulations. One of the largest hotel labor unions in the US and Canada, Unite Here, supported the new law.
The California Hotel & Lodging Association, the hotel industry's leading lobbyist group in the state, could not be reached for comment.
The CHLA, which worked with groups like the Hotel Association of Los Angeles and the American Hotel & Lodging Association to lobby against the passage of the ordinances, declined to comment and directed any request for comment back to Marriott.
The Hotel Association of Los Angeles said in a release this summer that the law may pave the way for similar laws in other cities.
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Marriott did not reply in time for publication.
There weren't any other Marriott branded hotels near the airport that levied the surcharge. The Ritz-Carlton Los Angeles, the JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. Live, and the West Hollywood Edition hotels were not charging the new fee.
The worker surcharge is one of the newest trends in the industry.
According to Leeny Oberg, Marriott's chief financial advisor, Marriott's daily rates in the U.S. and Canada were 15% above the year before, and profit margins at the property level were 2% higher than before.
She said on a company investor call that the focus at the hotel level was to contain operating costs and deliver superior service to guests.
It might seem odd that Marriott would allow hotel owners to use rip pricing, where a listed room rate gets higher by the time a guest actually books. Marriott only settled with the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office about resort fees.
It didn't mean giving up the practice. The company agreed to put the fees on the first page.
The worker protection surcharges were the same as the resort fees that were displayed in a blue box over the reservations page.
A buzz word in the accommodation sector this month is transparency, as evidenced by last week's announcement byAirbnb that it would incorporate all fees associated with a booking on the initial search page and listing rather than wait and provide the grand total at the time of booking.
Brian Chesky said on the investor call that transparency was the north star for the company.
In the case of the Marriott hotels near the airport, guests can either accept the new fee or just stay at any other Marriott-affiliated hotel in the region.
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