Latest hotel fee: A charge for non-smoking rooms

When Teri Salmons clicked on the MGM Grand's website to reserve a room recently, she found an "unbelievable" new fee.

Next to options for early check-in ($20) and late checkout ($20) she saw a $20 per day fee for "guaranteeing" a non-smoking room.

That's right. You have to pay extra if you want to stay away from the smoke.

"Most hotels are either all non-smoking these days, or at least the majority of their rooms are non-smoking," says Salmons, a Baltimore-based consultant. "What will they think of next — pay toilets?"

I asked MGM about the fee, and a representative promised to "check" into it. I never heard back from her. The website is equally forthcoming, indicating only that its "Non-Smoking Room Guarantee" promises that for $20 a night you're guaranteed "a non-smoking room."

Las Vegas resorts have always been a little fee-crazy, particularly when it comes to those amorphous mandatory "resort fees" tacked to your daily room rate. But has the MGM Grand gone too far this time?

Without getting sidetracked with a debate about smoking in hotels — a practice I believe should be illegal — here's the problem: In typical Sin City logic, the MGM fee punishes good behavior and rewards your vices. Instead of paying extra to smoke in your room, you're being asked to shell out more to be shielded from cancer-causing fumes.

By the way, knowing Vegas hotels like I do, I can't say the "guarantee" means much. I'm willing to bet you'll still catch an occasional whiff of cigarette smoke in your non-smoking room.

Vegas hotels are a lot like discount airlines, such as Spirit and Allegiant. They try to lure you in with a low price, but then sock it to you with extras like resort fees, energy surcharges and now, non-smoking room guarantees.

But before railing against these resorts for their customer-hostile practices, let's take a little timeout to think about how we got here. Hotel guests — people like you and me — indicated through our purchasing behavior that we cared about a low price, first and foremost. So hotels gave us artificially low "base" rates of $69 a night, minus the mandatory resort fee and the "I'd-rather-not-asphyxiate-tonight" guarantee of a smoke-free room.

Vegas hotels might argue that we did this to ourselves.

I'm not sure if I buy it, though. I think just because we want the lowest rate doesn't also mean we want to get hammered by fees.

Hotels should offer their guests non-smoking rooms by default, and they should reward them for not puffing away in their rooms, if not punish them for lighting up. That's how the rest of the world does it.

Better yet, smoking should be banned in hotels. Wisconsin and Michigan already have taken that path, despite loud protests from smokers' advocates. More will inevitably follow.

Christopher Elliott is the ombudsman for National Geographic Traveler magazine. His column runs weekly at seattletimes.com and occasionally in print. Contact him at celliott@ngs.org.