What looks wrong
A seat or a room advertised at a clean, comparable price.
What’s actually going on
Live-event tickets and short-term lodging spent years adding mandatory 'convenience,' 'service,' and 'resort' fees after the shopper had already picked a listing. In December 2024 the FTC issued a bipartisan Junk Fees Rule that does not ban fees — it requires the true total, including mandatory fees, to show up whenever a price is advertised.
You compare a $89 ticket to a $94 ticket, or a $169 room to a $188 room. Then checkout grows a convenience fee, a facility fee, a resort fee that was never optional, and the cheaper listing is not cheaper.
That pattern has a name in consumer-protection work: drip pricing. The advertised number is bait. The mandatory extras arrive after you have spent attention. Hotels have called them resort fees. Ticket sellers have called them service or convenience fees. Vacation-rental platforms have their own pile, often including cleaning fees that only appear late.
On 17 December 2024 the FTC announced a final Junk Fees Rule aimed at live-event ticketing and short-term lodging — hotels, motels, inns, and short-term rentals. The rule does not set a price cap. It says: if you advertise a price, advertise the total of what the customer must pay, more prominently than the teaser number, and do not misrepresent what a fee is for.
Taxes and truly optional add-ons can still sit outside that total if they are disclosed. The point of the rule, in the Commission's words, is that people 'will no longer be surprised by a pile of resort, convenience, or service fees inflating the advertised price.' Whether a given listing is still doing the old dance is a vote, not a lawsuit on this page.
Source: FTC final Junk Fees Rule press release, 17 December 2024. We quote the public record. A settlement is not always an admission.