The price was not the price.

A mandatory fee is not an extra, it is the price — and a price first mentioned at the desk is a change to an agreement you had already paid under.

Read this first

Pay it under protest, then take it back

Refusing at the desk buys you a standoff at midnight with your luggage, in the one venue where they hold every card. Do not fight there. Pay it, and as you do, send a one-line email from the lobby: that you are paying the fee under protest, that it formed no part of the price you agreed at booking, and that you will be reclaiming it. Those words cost you thirty seconds and change what the payment means — from acceptance of a revised price into money handed over under pressure with your objection on the record. Every letter afterwards starts from that email.

What you are owed

The fee back, where it was not in the total you agreed

You contracted at the total presented when you paid, and a mandatory charge disclosed afterwards was not part of it. This is a question of evidence, not fairness: the rate page as it stood when you booked either showed the fee inside the price or it did not. That screenshot outweighs anything either side could say about industry practice.

The fee back where the facilities were fiction

Where the fee was disclosed, it was disclosed for something — the pool, the spa, the gym, the shuttle. If what it names was shut, drained or a locked door, demand the fee back by name, as its own line with its own number. Small, specific and undeniable is the kind of demand that gets paid.

A regulator that is actually interested in this one

Drip pricing — advertising one total and charging another — is the rare hotel complaint that consumer regulators in the US, the UK and the EU have all been actively moving against. Report it factually to the consumer protection authority for the property's location, quoting the advertised total and the charged total, and say in your letter to the property that you have done so. Verify the correct body for the address rather than assuming.

How they will refuse, and what answers it

“The fee is disclosed on our website.”

Ask them to produce the rate page for the rate you actually booked, as displayed on the date you booked it, showing the fee inside the total. A line in the terms behind a link is not a price; the price is the number you were shown when you paid. Your screenshot answers this refusal, which is why it is taken before the first letter.

“Every hotel in this destination charges it.”

What other properties charge is not a term of your contract with this one. Standard practice is an argument about the industry; your claim is about a specific total you were shown and a different total you were charged. Decline the invitation to debate the industry.

“You signed for it at check-in.”

A signature on a registration card at the desk, on a booking already paid for, is an acknowledgement of arrival, not a renegotiation of the price. Ask for the version of the booking page that showed the fee at the point of payment. If it existed they will produce it at once, and if they cannot, the signature is carrying more weight than it can hold.

Gather this before you write

A full-page screenshot of the rate page as it appeared when you booked, showing the total, with the date visible
The booking confirmation showing the total you agreed to pay
The folio showing the fee as charged, and the name it was charged under — resort, destination, facility or amenity
Your under-protest email, with its timestamp
The registration card or anything else you signed at check-in
Photographs of any advertised facility the fee supposedly funded that was closed or absent

Now make them answer.

Tell us what happened in your own words. We write the letters, set the deadlines, and email each escalation on the day it is due.