The President Trump travel world is based on personal experience.
When Donald Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20, he will become the first president with an intimate, insider knowledge of the travel industry. He has owned hotel companies, giant casinos, and an airline. He has made and lost millions of dollars in the travel industry. He knows the travel industry better than any president in history. This may help Trump world travelers.
Trump’s knowledge of the travel world and his commitment to the forgotten citizens can certainly come into play as his administration takes on issues that only received extended lip service from the previous administration.
Yes, hotel resort fees and false hotel advertising were discussed for almost five years by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), but the Obama administration never took action. As for hidden airline fees that make comparison shopping impossible, the Department of Transportation hasn’t done anything substantive since the first days of the past administration.
What can we learn about President Trump’s beliefs about travel? Most politicians who have never been involved in the industry can talk a good game and posture but have no real experience. And virtually everyone in the political field, from legislators to administrators, has — or their bosses have — accepted significant donations from airlines, hotels, cruise lines and casinos.
Plus, much of D.C.’s civil servant staff is made up of former travel industry employees, lawyers and executives who move easily between legislative, executive and lobbying jobs. They don’t share a Trump world traveler point of view.
As anyone with even basic familiarity with Washington knows, money talks and brings amazing influence. The system is rigged against the common traveler.
What do Trump’s business actions lead us to expect?
When it comes to resort fees, President Trump knows the ropes. All of his hotels, except the Las Vegas property, do not charge deceptive resort fees. Las Vegas is a case where advertising corruption is so rampant and unchecked that honest advertisers are required to match dishonest pricing of other major gaming industry hotels.
Resort fees, or mandatory hotel-imposed fees, are a practice where much of the hotel industry uses false advertising to make their “room rates” appear less expensive. Some of the largest hotels add what the industry refers to as a resort fee, which every guest is required to pay prior to checkout. Yes, these fees are disclosed, but only later in the booking process after consumers have already invested time in the buying process.
The lists of hotel costs by price created by online travel agents like Expedia and Priceline and meta-search engines like Kayak and Hipmunk are filled with false advertising. These lists are made up of room rates without the inclusion of mandatory hotel resort fees. The individual hotel websites also list rooms by room rate and do not disclose mandatory resort fees until later in the buying process.
Many consumers assume the additional hotel fees are applied to all hotels. The American public has been trained to know that the government does not allow blatant false advertising. Unfortunately, in the case of hotel resort fees, the government, after almost five years of studies, has failed to protect consumers from this false advertising.
An FTC Economic Analysis of Hotel Resort Fees concludes by noting, “This analysis has not found any benefits to consumers from separately-disclosed mandatory resort fees that could not be achieved by first listing the total price and then disclosing the resort fee.” The report also states, “…separating mandatory resort fees from posted room rates without first disclosing the total price is likely to harm consumers…”
A Trump administration should simply call false advertising false. Consumers don’t need another five years of study; we have suffered enough.
Airline pricing should be public — both airfares and ancillary fees
There are no more forgotten citizens than the country’s airline passengers, and few areas of the economy more rigged than the aviation industry, where the people pay for all the infrastructure, the air traffic system, and the security administration and then face customer service indignities and price confusion when traveling.
Since 2009, Travelers United, an organization I founded and serve with, has been the leading consumer group battling the misleading and deceptive practice of providing incomplete aviation prices to the public. Together with the American Society of Travel Agents and much of the distribution side of the aviation industry, the consumer group has shone a light on the consumer harm of advertising partial prices and preventing comparison shopping.
After eight years of proposed rules, thousands of pages of comments, hundreds of hours of official meetings, and countless lobbying dollars and stakeholder policy group meetings, nothing has changed. We have been left with a request, issued from the White House, no less, for even more information in the waning days of the Obama administration.
Sadly, aviation consumers still cannot comparison shop for the full cost of air travel. Airlines still do not make their ancillary fees, with all of their exceptions and exemptions, public in a form that will allow software developers to create useful shopping engines that can aggregate airfares and fees to allow price comparisons.
As ancillary fees continued their unrestrained growth, the airline industry consolidated with three major airline mergers — United/Continental, Southwest/AirTran, and American/USAir. This has resulted in the concentration of more than 80 percent of domestic traffic into only four airlines. The effects of these mergers on both consumers and emerging airlines competition have been dramatic.
President-elect Trump has personally felt the pain of economic blows with which the biggest airlines can strike smaller competitors. He understands customer service and unfair competition. His Trump Shuttle, designed with passenger perks, was doomed by larger airlines that abandoned customer service and jointly slashed prices.
Consumers need action and rules, not more studies
President-elect Trump ran on a platform and promise to the American public that he would take care of the forgotten citizens and institute fairness rather than the current rigged system. The travel industry that he understands in detail is a good place to start.
Even the simplest solutions can be thwarted when they are studied ad nauseum. With eight years of discussions about the aviation consumer plight and five years of work by the FTC, the most basic needs for truth in advertising and complete pricing are still out of reach of travel consumers, the very people the government swears an oath to protect.
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Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
