BTW, Mandalay Bay just charged you for watching that.

However, I can tell you that this practice was pioneered a little over a decade ago in Las Vegas by a few operators known to specialize in catering to the niche market of clueless kids (Hard Rock & Stratosphere) and which have since been through multiple bankruptcy reorganizations, and spread more readily to those that do a lot of their business with group bookings and do NOT tend to depend as much as others on repeat business from loyal returning customers booking as independent travelers spending their own money. Chew on that last bit Clem. The meaning will come to you, I'm sure, if you ponder it hard enough.

I disagree with you on this. This practice was pioneered long before that and outside of las vegas. the pioneer of this practice was the "In room telephone Charge" which was added to your bill regardless of whether you wanted to use a phone or not........ I ran into this long ago and it was widespread. Later we saw this practice spread to an "energy surcharge".

...and spread more readily to those that do a lot of their business with group bookings...

No Clem, I really don't think so, son. I'm pretty sure I've traveled more thousands of miles and spent more nights in hotels in just the last two years alone (over 150,000 and over 250 respectively) than you have in your life, and most likely more in the last decade than you probably ever will, and among sensible travelers a preference for a reasonable degree of certainty as to what is being provided and what will be charged for it is often an important value when booking a room. People quite intelligently avoid providers of goods and services known to engage in these practices, tending to avoid exposing themselves to moving targets on the road, preferring to gamble with something other than their essential accommodations and to avoid doing so while in the vulnerable position of standing at the registration desk with their luggage. Large business enterprises providing retail goods and services with extensive geographic reach frequently invest a great deal to achieve a dependable predictable reputation to insure their long range success. People quite intelligently avoid providers of goods and services known to engage in these practices, and on a personal level the people who are comfortable rationalizing them.

Since they are working to disguise their actual price, obviously MGM does not agree with your view on "all that matters" Clem. Neither do most travelers. Neither do states' attorneys general who've brought successful fraud suits with others over this issue. This bait and switch scam quite rightly generates a considerable amount of ill-will among customers, and it is very well known and acknowledged by those doing it that while it generates significant immediate revenue it does so at the expense of reducing repeat business in the future. And the stench from it often attaches not just to the individual enterprise pulling the scam, but to the reputation of the destination as a whole for travelers. You'll just have to pardon us idiots who persist in thinking we'd prefer to be reasonably sure what something will actually cost BEFORE we purchase it rather than afterward without having to delve into a research project to vet the truthfulness of the rate we are quoted, and have misgivings about dealing with those who can't manage to pass over that little ankle-high business ethics yardstick.

Or perhaps I'm just an idiot, who doesn't understand what the hell he's doing, lacking the superior cognitive capacity necessary. After all, having at one time managed three hotel properties among other things in the course of my decrepit sad idiot's life probably doesn't help me understand what is going on here any more than my academic Economics degree, at least not on the level of the deep Clem hotel fee metagame. However, I can tell you that this practice was pioneered a little over a decade ago in Las Vegas by a few operators known to specialize in catering to the niche market of clueless kids (Hard Rock & Stratosphere) and which have since been through multiple bankruptcy reorganizations, and spread more readily to those that do a lot of their business with group bookings and do NOT tend to depend as much as others on repeat business from loyal returning customers booking as independent travelers spending their own money. Chew on that last bit Clem. The meaning will come to you, I'm sure, if you ponder it hard enough.

Somehow I doubt that investors are grilling the CFO's about that ONE SMALL REVENUE LINE on the P&L.

I ask, "Doesn't Mirage charge a resort fee? Didn't your friend have to pay that? Doesn't that include Internet access?"

His reply, "I dunno--he just said when he tried to access the Internet from his room it told him he had to pay $15/day and it'd be billed to his credit card automatically."

Yet here it is on their web page: "There is no charge associated with the internet access, as it is an inclusion of the resort fee."

Common theme. I've read multiple posts from people who said they were actually billed for Internet access despite having paid the resort fees at the MGM properties. They had to argue with the desk to get the Internet fee removed. And even if they aren't intending to double bill for such things, why are they lying to their customers about the charges?