How to Avoid Copycat Hotel Website Fees --- Third-party sites look like well-known chains, but charge extra that you don't need to pay

"We all want to snag the best hotel deal, whether shopping for a Four Seasons or Fairfield Inn. Here's one way to ensure you won't: Book it through a look-alike third-party website.

Maybe you've seen them: those links that often pop up first when you search for a hotel. They are typically sponsored ads that make you think you're booking directly by including the hotel's name and keywords like reservations in the URL.

But you most definitely aren't booking directly with the hotel.

You are booking through an online reseller that gets rooms from bigger travel agencies. These resellers often sport onerous fees and restrictions you wouldn't find when reserving a room on the hotel's website, or through one of the giant players like Expedia and Booking.com.

The trouble is it's not always easy to tell that you're going to one of these reseller sites -- regulators have called some of their practices deceptive. And the added fees, which can be hefty, are easily overlooked by rushed travelers.

Consider a two-night stay at the modest but steps-from-the-beach Grandview Inn in Hermosa Beach, Calif., for Mother's Day weekend.

Book a room on the official-sounding grandviewinn.guestreservations.com link Google serves up and you'll pay $748.61 all in. The total price for the stay on the hotel's website: $568.

Same room type. Same nightly room rate.

The $180 difference: Guest Reservations adds $250 for "tax recovery charges and service fees" to the bill. The hotel adds just $70 in taxes. There is no breakdown of what the $250 covers. Guest Reservations, which calls itself an independent travel network, didn't respond to requests for comment.

Zubin Patel manages the 17-room Grandview Inn. The look-alike marketers frustrate him -- and his guests. "All they do is basically mark up our prices," he says.

Travelers have shown up at the front desk angry because they are paying more than the current price on the website. They insist they booked direct; they didn't.

"They are totally getting ripped off," he says.

The hotel industry and the Federal Trade Commission have been fighting look-alike sites for years. Yet they still pop up everywhere and can snare even the most seasoned travelers.

How can this be? The online ecosystem for booking hotel rooms is surprisingly complex and fragmented. Hotels offer rooms directly, but they need all the eyeballs they can attract to fill rooms in a competitive industry. So they turn to middlemen, typically big travel sites like Expedia, to get wider distribution.

The more shelves the hotel rooms are on, so to speak, the better chance they have of being sold. So the big sites will often be allowed to offer rooms to other third-party sites.

The end result: Hotels often don't know what sites are offering their rooms and have difficulty tracing a sale back to a particular seller. That opens the door to questionable fees and behavior.

A friend booked a last-minute stay at a LaQuinta hotel in Arizona in February. She called the hotel immediately to change the date after she realized she booked the wrong night.

They couldn't help her because she unknowingly booked it through Guest Reservations (my friends don't always take my advice to book direct!). It was a prepaid, nonrefundable reservation. She was out $152.81, including $47 in taxes and service fees. (The hotel told me the taxes on the $105 room were just $13.)

"Unfortunately, there's not a lot we can do," says Rosanna Maietta, president and chief executive of the American Hotel and Lodging Association.

With an estimated 60% of hotel bookings online today, the opportunity for consumer error is high. So the key is education.

She encourages travelers to take the time to really check the website they are using, compare the total price on multiple websites and read the fine print before clicking buy. Bigger chain hotels are spending more on ads to capture that top search spot but don't always win. And smaller hotels often can't afford it.

How to spot the differences if you don't use a travel agent or hotel-chain app? Study the conventions in official hotel-chain websites versus the impostors.

The official website for the Four Seasons in Austin, Texas, for example is fourseasons.com/austin. Guest Reservations lists it as fourseasonsaustin.guestreservations.com. Other websites that try to mimic hotel URLs include Reservation Stays and Reservation Counter. (In late 2017, the latter settled FTC charges that it misled consumers.)

Book direct when possible so you have the most flexibility and earn hotel loyalty points and other perks. Sometimes you don't even have to prepay.

There's not much the hotel can do with third-party bookings of any sort, including those reserved on Expedia et al. Who hasn't been told to contact the booking site for any changes, refunds or travel issues?

But most try to help when they can because their reputation is on the line, Maietta says.

"Even though they are not responsible. . .a hotel will feel like it's their obligation to make it right because they're in the customer service business. They don't want your experience to be ruined from the jump."

If you feel you've been duped, cancel if that's an option. (It's often not.) Otherwise file a complaint with the FTC online or by calling its consumer response center at 877-382-4357." [1]

1. Carry On: How to Avoid Copycat Hotel Website Fees --- Third-party sites look like well-known chains, but charge extra that you don't need to pay. Gilbertson, Dawn.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 27 Mar 2025: A9.