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What would you do to avoid an annoying travel fee?

Jodi Blodgett is so sick of all the extras that she’s stopped flying.

“I avoid travel fees by driving,” she says. Not only can she skirt ridiculous fees for luggage, but she also doesn’t have to pay more cash for the seat assignment and other junk fees the airlines charge her.

How far would you go? Would you pack less? Skip a nice hotel?

Would you lie?

After an exhausting record year of travel, maybe we all suffer from fee fatigue. Travelers are furious — and it’s not just people like Blodget who have sworn off flying.

Inflated fees dampen summer travel, with more people either staying with friends or family or not travelling. Bad service can be costly to a business. The latest National Customer Rage Survey, citing record consumer dissatisfaction, estimates that companies risk $887 billion yearly in future revenue, up from $494 billion in 2020.

You can’t always avoid flying. Blodgett, a photographer in Webster, Mass., says it’s easy to reach a client in the tri-state area by car. But for longer distances, you have to head to the airport.

“Still,” she says, “I go to great lengths.”

Many of us are going to great lengths to avoid these preposterous surcharges.

Oh, the things we do to avoid fees!

Here are some of the creative ways travellers have been sidestepping fees.

Avoiding luggage fees by packing like a minimalist. This year, with almost every major U.S. airline jacking up their checked luggage fees, the response from passengers was predictable. “I’m packing minimally and efficiently,” says Daniel Rivera, who runs a property management company in East Rutherford, N.J. “I put everything in a single bag that I can stow under the seat in front of me.”

Not paying seat selection fees — and ending up in a middle seat. Kevin Mercier, a project manager for an auto manufacturer in Paris, says he’s taken “extreme” measures to avoid seat selection fees. Not paying them means he ends up in a middle seat, but he’s okay. ” I was willing to endure the cramped conditions and lack of privacy because the cost of selecting a preferred seat was substantial,” says Mercier, who is also a travel photographer.

Avoiding hotel resort fees by booking somewhere else. Hotel resort fees are mandatory fees added to your hotel bill after the hotel quotes you a room rate, and sometimes much later. Christian Strange, an insurance agent from Virginia Beach, Va., says he won’t darken the door of a hotel that charges a “gotcha” resort fee. On a recent trip to Miami, he skipped the large chain hotel with a resort fee and stayed at a boutique hotel a few blocks from the beach. “The location still allowed me to enjoy the area — but at a fraction of the cost,” he says. He’s not alone. I hear travellers say they’ll never stay at a hotel with a resort fee.

Ramzy Ladah, an attorney and frequent air traveller from Las Vegas, says these strategies reflect a broader shift in traveller behaviour.

“People are fed up with being nickel-and-dimed, and they’re pushing back in the only ways they know how,” he says. “It’s about taking back control.”

Would you lie or cheat to avoid a fee?

One of the most intriguing questions is whether travellers would lie or cheat to avoid a fee. What’s a cheat? For a few years, passengers could game Southwest Airlines’ “Early Bird” access to its seats. One traveller would pay extra to board early and save seats for the rest of the party. That infuriated some passengers. (Alas, Southwest closed that loophole and is now moving to assigned seating, so no more Early Bird cheat-cheats.)

If the Department of Transportation gets its way, airlines will soon be barred from charging fees to assign seats for kids 13 or under next to their parents or accompanying adults. And although passengers must give birthdays when buying an airline ticket, I’ve also met many air travellers who have lied about their kids’ ages to bypass these fees.

Resort fees are also easy to avoid with a bit of insider knowledge. You can use a corporate booking code to avoid paying the fee. Corporate travel managers have negotiated these nuisance fees away — but only for their employees. And those with the booking code. (I’m not endorsing this strategy in any way.)

So, will passengers bend a fact or two to avoid paying a bill? No doubt about it. The reason is simple: People feel the fees are unfair and often charged after a travel company quotes them a rate. It’s a lie. And they think they have a license to lie right back if they’re being lied to.

But two wrongs don’t make a right. You’re better off avoiding these airlines and hotels than giving them your business.

Now, what happens to these fees?

We’re not in a good place, observers say.

“The proliferation of fees has led to a more complex and less transparent booking process, where the initial price seen by the traveler can be misleading,” says Raymond Yorke, a spokesman for Redpoint Travel Protection. “This has fueled a rise in fee-avoidance behavior as travelers seek to control costs.”

Yorke says it also points to a broader issue within the travel industry where the emphasis on ancillary revenue has overshadowed customer satisfaction. In other words, travel companies care more about money than they do about you.

I know, big surprise.

And despite your creative avoidance strategies, travel companies — particularly airlines — seem more addicted to fees than ever. And they don’t have to stop. There are no laws to prevent them from inventing new surcharges or from increasing existing ones. They don’t have to justify the increases, either.

Unfortunately, there’s no meaningful competition since many travel companies dominate their markets. (Again, that’s especially true for U.S. airlines.) So, travellers may go to extremes to avoid fees. But in the end, they’ll have to pay up if they want to travel.

Our fee-avoidance is more than a few money-saving tricks. It’s a silent protest against an industry that’s lost its way. Travel should expand our horizons, not shrink our wallets.