You find the perfect hotel online. The rate looks reasonable—maybe even a bargain. You click through to book, feeling pleased with yourself. Then, somewhere in the checkout process, a new line appears: resort fee, $45 per night. Suddenly your deal isn't quite what it seemed.

This isn't an accident or an oversight. It's a deliberate pricing strategy called drip pricing, and hotels have refined it into an art form. Understanding why it works reveals something important about how we make decisions—and why businesses design prices to exploit those tendencies.

When you search for hotels, you probably sort by price. Everyone does. Hotel booking sites know this, which is why they typically display the base room rate prominently while burying mandatory fees in the fine print. The hotel charging $199 plus a $50 resort fee appears cheaper than the one charging $240 all-in—even though it costs more.

This creates a prisoner's dilemma for hotels. If your competitors are hiding fees, you either match their strategy or watch your property sink to page three of search results. The hotel with transparent pricing looks expensive by comparison, regardless of actual total cost. So even hotels that might prefer honest pricing feel pressure to adopt drip pricing just to stay visible.

The result is a race where everyone competes on incomplete prices. Hotels aren't necessarily trying to deceive you—they're responding rationally to a system that rewards whoever can make their number look smallest in that crucial first comparison.

Takeaway

When everyone competes on partial prices, the incentive shifts from offering better value to hiding costs more effectively.

Good decisions require good comparisons. If you're choosing between three hotels, you need to compare their total costs against what each one offers. Drip pricing deliberately makes this harder. Each property bundles different fees—resort fees, amenity fees, destination fees—with different names and different inclusions.

One hotel's resort fee includes pool access and gym. Another's covers WiFi and a daily newspaper. A third charges separately for everything. To make a true comparison, you'd need to unbundle each fee, figure out what you actually want, and recalculate. That's exhausting, and hotels know most people won't bother.

This is the economic concept of search costs in action. Comparing prices takes time and mental energy. When businesses make comparison harder, they raise your search costs. Eventually, many shoppers give up on finding the true best deal and just pick something that seems reasonable. The fog benefits whoever created it.

Takeaway

Complexity isn't a bug in drip pricing—it's the feature. The harder you make comparisons, the less price competition matters.

Here's where psychology enters the picture. That first price you see doesn't just inform your decision—it shapes your entire perception of value. Psychologists call this anchoring. Once $199 lodges in your mind as the price, everything that follows gets evaluated relative to that anchor.

When the resort fee appears later, you're no longer asking whether $249 total is a good price for this hotel. You're asking whether $50 extra is acceptable on top of the deal you thought you had. These are psychologically different questions, and the second one is much easier to say yes to. You've already invested time comparing options and mentally committed to this hotel. The fee feels like a small addition rather than a significant portion of the cost.

This is why drip pricing works even when you notice it. The damage is done the moment you anchor on the lower number. Your reference point has shifted, and the true total seems like a reasonable step up from a good deal rather than what it actually is: just the price.

Takeaway

The first number you see becomes your mental benchmark—everything after that gets judged as a deviation from it, not as part of the real price.

Resort fees persist because they work on multiple levels. They win the search ranking game, they muddy comparisons with competitors, and they exploit how our brains process sequential information. Hotels aren't being irrational—they're responding to incentives that reward opacity.

Next time you book travel, try adding up total costs before you start comparing. It takes extra effort, but it neutralizes the anchor. You'll see prices as they actually are, not as businesses want you to perceive them.