On the Road: Barrage of Fees Is Starting To Follow Fliers to the Hotel

This year, hotels in the United States will collect an estimated $2.1 billion in fees and surcharges, up from $2 billion in 2012, according to a new analysis by the Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management at New York University.

Of course, that’s small potatoes compared with the airline industry’s revenue from fees, which totaled $6 billion last year just in charges for checked bags and for changing an itinerary. Still, “the airline industry has created great cover that has emboldened the hotel industry,” said Bjorn Hanson, the divisional dean at the center.

Fee revenue has more than doubled in the last 10 years, as many hotels, especially convention, resort and luxury ones, add charges to the bill for services like the use of a business center or an Internet connection, and in some cases apply so-called resort fees that essentially are surcharges for using the hotel’s facilities.

Fees are also being added at some hotels for early checkout, receiving faxes and overnight packages, automatic gratuities and even things like minibar restocking, availability of in-room safes and mandatory valet parking.

Hey, don’t get me started. While attending a conference at a resort hotel in Phoenix two years ago, I was amazed to find a $12 charge for porterage — bellhop service, even though, like many of you, I always wheel my own bags. And charges for housekeeping service — that is, making your bed and cleaning your room — also turn up here and there.

Some readers even tell me that they have encountered charges for a donation to a local charity tacked onto a hotel bill.

And as I noted last week when I checked into the Hilton Bayfront Hotel in San Diego, the clerk asked me if I wanted to pay an extra $20 for a room with a better view. Not paying it got me a 19th-floor room by the elevators with a view of the maritime docks where trucks were unloading a banana boat. (This, actually, turned out to be interesting to watch, and I avoided the $20 surcharge.)

The hotel also charged $13.95 for basic Internet service and $19.95 for faster-speed service, which is not uncommon for higher-price hotels. In the business center, the charge for using a computer was $6.95 for each 15 minutes, an impressive $27.80 an hour.

On my bill at checkout, in addition to the basic nightly room rate of $260 and $27.50 in taxes, there was a daily charge of $5.20 listed as SD TMD Assessment. The city treasurer’s office describes that as a fee “to promote events and tourism in San Diego” that is levied specifically on hotels, which have the option of passing it on.

Incidentally, when I checked out a day earlier than originally planned, I was told the “early departure fee” was $75. I protested, and the front-desk clerk checked with a manager and dropped that charge “as a one-time courtesy.”

It’s important to note, by the way, that many hotel brands favored by business travelers are not in the fee-adding game. Across the industry, midlevel hotels with strong bases in business travel provide a range of services without any extra charge — from free Internet and business-center access to free breakfasts and in some cases even a free evening cocktail hour with snacks. I will enthusiastically stay when it’s feasible at one of these brands, whether a Hampton Inn or Garden Inn, a Country Inns and Suites, a Marriott Residence — to name just a few in that market niche.

The convention and meetings industry will account for a hefty $117 billion of the estimated overall $273.3 billion being spent this year on business travel in the United States, according to the Global Business Travel Association. Meetings are planned years in advance, and corporate event planners are negotiating future deals with hotels that have gained a lot more bargaining power as the hotel industry revives.

That means corporate planners need better data to negotiate on things like group rates, Wi-Fi and bandwidth capacity in rooms and meeting spaces, and other charges. “Hotels now are in the driver’s seat because there is more demand than supply” for some group events, said Kevin Iwamoto, the vice president for industry strategy business solutions at Active Network, a company that provides data management and cost-control technology for companies in the meetings industry.

The meetings and convention business is also growing internationally, as part of the estimated $1.12 trillion that will be spent globally on business travel this year, an increase of 5.4 percent over 2012, according to the trade group.

While some international travelers already encounter energy surcharges and other fees in some smaller hotels, the powerhouse hotel chains based in North America and rapidly expanding abroad are exporting the fee mentality, said Mr. Hanson of the Tisch center. “Some resort fees are becoming common worldwide, often because the North American brands take those practices globally,” he said.

Adding fees is “still more of a U.S. phenomenon than it is globally, but it’s catching on in the major gateway cities where North American brands have been transmitting these practices,” he added.

As Culture Moves Online, France Tries to Follow It With a Tax

PARIS — France’s “cultural exception” — the policy that creative works like books, music and movies deserve protection beyond what is accorded ordinary goods — is in line for a digital update.

A government adviser has suggested that manufacturers pay a 1 percent levy on the price of smartphones and tablet computers to help keep funding for such works alive, as more and more end up online and beyond the reach of existing taxes.

The tax, “painless for the consumer,” could also be used to ensure that artists are remunerated at a time when so much is downloaded free, said the report, which was presented Monday to President François Hollande and his culture minister, Aurélie Filippetti.

“Considering the weight of cultural content in connected devices, it is legitimate that those who make and distribute the equipment contribute to the financing of its creation,” according to the report, produced under the guidance of a former television executive and journalist, Pierre Lescure.

“L’exception culturelle” is no trifling matter: Nicole Bricq, the French trade minister, warned in March that it was “a red line” that could not be crossed in talks with the United States on a proposed free-trade area. France and 13 other European Union member nations insisted in a letter this week that the audiovisual sector must be left out of those talks, setting up a possible confrontation with the British prime minister, David Cameron, who has said that everything should be on the table.

In practice, the cultural exception means broadcasters must meet quotas for French music and television programming, for example, and prices for books are set by regulators. The effort stretches throughout the economy, requiring a system of taxes and subsidies for its upkeep, perhaps most visibly in the country’s film industry, which gets hundreds of million euros each year in subsidies — raised from taxes on movie tickets, television stations and Internet service providers — to defend itself from the Hollywood juggernaut.

But technology threatens to render such measures irrelevant, the report noted. The nature of Internet commerce means foreigners can have access to the French market without having to pay the levies that support French culture. And as more content is streamed online or stored in the cloud, a tax on recording media like blank compact discs and memory sticks will raise less money — and that is where the smartphone tax comes in.

Gilles Vercken, an intellectual property lawyer, acknowledged that streaming and the cloud would bring down those levies, which he estimated currently raise about €200 million, or $260 million, a year to support French authors, composers, actors, musicians and the like. But he expressed skepticism that the smartphone tax would see the light of day.

“I wonder what could be the legal grounds for such taxes,” he said, noting that the connection between hardware manufacturers and end users might prove a difficult one to defend in court. “I really don’t see it.”

Monica Horten, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics who studies the politics of intellectual property rights, said that, in principle, such levies were possible under E.U. law, but that “the problem is in the implementation.”

The first issue would be drafting a law acceptable to the European Court of Justice, while another would be in actually getting device makers on board to pay the tax. “I think you can expect them to filibuster,” she said.

The report seeks to address a problem that is as old as the Internet, which has shifted the balance of power away from content creators in favor of newer actors like Google, Amazon and peer-to-peer downloading services, even as it gives creators previously unimagined opportunities to be seen or heard.

In addressing such matters, France has sometimes chosen to fight battles that other governments have shied away from. For instance, Google agreed in February to set up a €60 million fund to help French newspaper and magazine publishers develop their digital business, though it managed to fend off demands that it pay for the right to link to their content.

And the Lescure report comes less than two weeks after Arnaud Montebourg, the minister for industrial renewal, put the kibosh on a sale to Yahoo of a majority stake in Dailymotion, a French rival to YouTube, because the government had singled out the company as a national champion and did not want control falling into foreign hands.

The Lescure report also suggests that France throw out a “three-strikes” anti-piracy law that Nicolas Sarkozy, Mr. Hollande’s predecessor, had held up as one of his signature achievements and one that had been hailed by the global entertainment industry. Under the Hadopi Law, as it is known, illegal downloaders were to have their Internet access cut off if they failed to heed three warnings; violators were also to be subject to criminal sanctions and large fines. In practice, there has been little enforcement action, though proponents credit the law with helping to reduce Internet piracy.

If Mr. Lescure’s recommendations are followed, law enforcement will focus on the worst violators, and most people would face minimal fines. A proposed “Hadopi authority” would be eliminated, and responsibility for enforcement would revert to the national media regulator, the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel.

Preoccupations: Follow a Career Passion? Let It Follow You

For many of my peers, this decision would have been fraught with anxiety. Growing up, we were told by guidance counselors, career advice books, the news media and others to “follow our passion.” This advice assumes that we all have a pre-existing passion waiting to be discovered. If we have the courage to discover this calling and to match it to our livelihood, the thinking goes, we’ll end up happy. If we lack this courage, we’ll end up bored and unfulfilled — or, worse, in law school.

To a small group of people, this advice makes sense, because they have a clear passion. Maybe they’ve always wanted to be doctors, writers, musicians and so on, and can’t imagine being anything else.

But this philosophy puts a lot of pressure on the rest of us — and demands long deliberation. If we’re not careful, it tells us, we may end up missing our true calling. And even after we make a choice, we’re still not free from its effects. Every time our work becomes hard, we are pushed toward an existential crisis, centered on what for many is an obnoxiously unanswerable question: “Is this what I’m really meant to be doing?” This constant doubt generates anxiety and chronic job-hopping.

As I considered my options during my senior year of college, I knew all about this Cult of Passion and its demands. But I chose to ignore it. The alternative career philosophy that drove me is based on this simple premise: The traits that lead people to love their work are general and have little to do with a job’s specifics. These traits include a sense of autonomy and the feeling that you’re good at what you do and are having an impact on the world. Decades of research on workplace motivation back this up. (Daniel Pink’s book “Drive” offers a nice summary of this literature.)

These traits can be found in many jobs, but they have to be earned. Building valuable skills is hard and takes time. For someone in a new position, the right question is not, “What is this job offering me?” but, instead, “What am I offering this job?”

RETURNING to my story, I decided after only minimal deliberation to go to M.I.T. True to my alternative career philosophy, I was confident that all three of my career options could be transformed into a source of passion, and this confidence freed me from worry about making a wrong choice. I ended up choosing M.I.T., mainly because of a slight preference for the East Coast, but I would have been equally content heading out to Microsoft’s headquarters near Seattle. Or, with the advance from my first book, I could have hunkered down in a quiet town to write.

During my initial years as a graduate student, I certainly didn’t enjoy an unshakable sense that I had found my true calling. The beginning of doctoral training can be rough. You’re not yet skilled enough to make contributions to the research literature, which can be frustrating. And at a place like M.I.T., you’re surrounded by brilliance, which can make you question whether you belong.

Had I subscribed to the “follow our passion” orthodoxy, I probably would have left during those first years, worried that I didn’t feel love for my work every day. But I knew that my sense of fulfillment would grow over time, as I became better at my job. So I worked hard, and, as my competence grew, so did my engagement.

Today, I’m a computer science professor at Georgetown University, and I love my job. The most important lesson I can draw from my experience is that this love has nothing to do with figuring out at an early age that I was meant to be a professor. There’s nothing special about my choosing this particular path. What mattered is what I did once I made my choice.

To other young people who constantly wonder if the grass might be greener on the other side of the occupational fence, I offer this advice: Passion is not something you follow. It’s something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world.

Cal Newport is the author of “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.”