Unauthorized Smoking Fee

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

In the last few months, the Marriott hotel chain has gone completely “smoke-free,” and the 10% of its rooms that used to be set aside for smoking guests are no more. This comes as no surprise, as public areas in which smoking is tolerated have shrunk to about the size of a dinner plate.

However, the hotel chain also imposes a $250 smoking fee it calls a “Recovery Fee” if it believes unauthorized smoking took place in a room. “Proof” of the infraction can be as little as employees believing they smelled smoke in an empty room.

Is this something that’s bad news for smokers but good news for non-smokers? Not if you’re a non-smoker whose credit card was charged $250 because an employee thought he smelled smoke. This is what happened to a Saratoga man who contacted Consumer Action. James was charged the $250 Recovery Fee even though he and his guest are non-smokers and did not smoke in the room.

Other guests have complained about the fee being applied in a rogue manner as well, by Marriott as well as other hotels that impose their own smoking fees.

The $250 fee allegedly is for cleaning, or for returning the room to its original state before the smoking violation. But whether the soiled rooms are in fact being cleaned beyond normal standards is not clear at all. And, even if this is the case, the fact that the potential cleaning would be done with existing equipment by existing employees makes $250 an outlandish sum.

Also, if the only “evidence” of the violation is the smell of smoke in a room, how can anyone determine whether this resulted from smoking in the room or, say, wearing clothes that smell like smoke because you smoked before you arrived at the hotel?

Smoking imposes great costs of its own—leaks in one’s personal budget, medical bills when you get lung cancer, and public health costs as well. But a policy to ensure a cleaner, safer hotel shouldn’t be abused as a license to steal.

Marriott can’t act as judge, jury, and executioner, and if abuses of the policy end up in court, the hotel could wind up paying out a lot more money than the fee takes in.

Among large chains, Sheraton, Hilton and Quality Inn hotels still offer designated smoking rooms.