Hotels with resort fees as low as $2.50

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First and foremost: The best resort fee is no resort fee. Although hotels can certainly charge additional fees for optional services, all mandatory fees should be included in the room rate. Resort fees -- which may be disguised as a service fee, energy fee or simply listed as "miscellaneous" on your invoice -- are a way for hotels to charge guests more without displaying higher room rates. Plus, they make it difficult to compare prices without clicking through to the final booking page and reading all the fine print for every property you consider.

Since resort fees aren't included in room rates, you may need to pay the fees even on award night stays. The cost of these fees also won't count toward the cost of your free night when booking through Hotels.com/venture to get a 24% return with your Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card through Jan. 31, 2020. TPG's Loyalty and Engagement Editor Richard Kerr recently rounded up the 10 most outrageous resort fees, and TPG has additional posts discussing why resort fees must go and how to avoid resort fees.

Luckily, despite how it may feel, most properties don't charge resort fees. When they do, the fee is usually high, to the tune of $20, $30 or more per day. Small resort fees can actually be trickier to spot -- especially if the property caters to travelers who aren't familiar with normal taxes and fees in the region, or if the resort fee is labeled as a service fee or miscellaneous fee. In these cases, guests may not even realize they are paying a resort fee.

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The table below shows some properties in major loyalty programs that levy a resort fee of less than $20 per night. Although these fees are relatively small, they're easy to miss as they could easily blend into the nightly total if you aren't careful.

As you can see in the table, most of the properties aren't resorts in the traditional sense. You might also notice that many of the properties in the table are part of Choice Hotels or Wyndham. However, don't assume only these properties are levying resort fees. Many other properties at these destinations also charge resort fees, and simply aren't included in this table because they charge $20 a fee of or more per night.

Finally, this list is not designed to be comprehensive -- feel free to mention additional properties with low resort fees that can be easy to miss in the comment section below.

Bottom line

These small resort fees are easy to overlook, and many hotels don't even provide a list of actual benefits for paying them. For the properties that do provide a list of benefits, most benefits are (1) not benefits I'd use, (2) benefits that are normally expected at a hotel or (3) benefits that I'd get as an elite. In almost every case, I'd choose to opt out of the fees if I could. You can certainly ask at check-in or checkout to have the fees waived, but you may or may not be successful.

If you're upset about resort fees, the best solution is to avoid properties that charge them. However, doing so will require reading the fine print and investigating the taxes and fees during booking carefully.