I learned a really valuable lesson today from a really nice hotel. I’m on vacation with my family in Grand Cayman in the Caribbean. We’re staying at the Westin Hotel which is a beautiful property.
The hotel says you get a nice room for the price. Fair enough. When you check in, they tell you that you will have a mandatory $20 fee, per night, per room, for use of their gym, sauna and steam room, whether you use it or not. Ok. We have two rooms.
When you get to your room, there are two really nice tall bottles of water waiting for you. Until you get closer and see tags around the bottles saying that if you touch them you will automatically be billed $7.50 per bottle. Ouch. To use the internet is another $15 per day. To use their business center costs $1 per minute. Then they charge in increments of $10 per 10 minutes.
Then, since there were no rooms with two double beds they gave us a king size bed. That’s nice, right? Well, where’s my other son supposed to sleep? “You need a roll-a-way, right?” they asked at the front desk. “Yes…” I answered. “That will be $15 per night, per room,” came the quick reply. We needed two roll-aways. (My mother-in-law was so incensed that because they didn’t have the right beds, we shouldn’t be charged for the extra bedding. They agreed. “Thanks, Helene!)
This is how a nice hotel nickels and dimes their way to customer hell. It’s not that I can’t afford this. I can. It’s the way they use these little charges to ruin a great experience at a nice resort.
How does this relate to you?
If you charge clients for your services, you might have noticed a similar pattern. You might charge for postage or photocopying. Maybe you keep track of your paperclips for each client. There’s nothing wrong with that from a tracking standpoint. But look at it from the client’s point of view. Every time you think or breathe on the case, the client gets charged. Fedex; charge. Highlighters; charge it. Binders; charge it. Phone usage; charge it.
As far as the hotel goes, if they simply charged me an extra $75 per night for my room and included everything else in the hotel for ‘free’, I’d be fine with that. In your law practice you might consider the same thing. Charge a higher fee and then tell your client that all the incidentals are free. “Compliments of the house!”
Don’t banish yourself to client hell by nickel and diming your clients. You’ll regret it.
I’m not a lawyer… but this type of practice is really a form of bait-n-switch and is not looked to fondly on by consumers.
Be an all-inclusive resource to your clientele and watch how they react. It might surprise that you will actually make more money when you are nickeling them to death.
A few years back I contracted out my appellate work to an hourly rate per diem attorney. I got back a bill with charges for Westlaw time and paper. Gerry, I learned to do my own appeals. End of story.
Hi Gerry, Love your blog! Have to say that while I agree w/a more flat-rate approach to add-on hotel charges, there also needs to be transparency in what those charges include–otherwise it’s a cell phone monthly statement waiting to happen (ie, fees that aren’t spelled out and incite the same level of consumer ire). But particularly in service-based industry, nickel & diming isn’t ideal. By the way, loving your caricature–who’s the artist?
I will check to see which company I used for the caricature. It came out great.