Last week I paid for two hotel rooms on the same night.  One was in Raleigh.  The other was in Greenville, North Carolina.  Carol and I slept in only one of them.

It wasn’t because of an airline cancellation, bad weather, or a mistake by either hotel.  It happened because I wasn’t fully aware of who I was actually booking the rooms with.

Carol and I had just spent several enjoyable days in North Carolina visiting good friends and attending a family wedding.

I booked our Thursday night hotel in Raleigh directly with the Marriott. Everything went exactly as expected.

For the next three nights, we planned to stay at the Hampton Inn in Greenville. I searched online, found what I believed was the hotel’s reservation information, and made the booking. Or so I thought.

Then, our plans changed. We decided to spend Friday night in Raleigh and drive to Greenville on Saturday morning. I assumed one phone call would take care of everything.  Instead, the Hampton Inn explained that they couldn’t change my reservation.  I hadn’t booked the room with them.  I had booked through a third-party reservation service.

The cancellation policy of the reservation company said changing the reservation would cost one night’s room and tax. Since we still needed the room for the remaining two nights, I checked in remotely at the Hampton Inn in Greenville while Carol and I spent Friday night in Raleigh.

That’s how I ended up paying for two hotel rooms on the same night.  Fortunately, I could afford the extra expense.  Not everyone could.

After returning home, I became curious about what had happened.

The confirmation from the reservation company showed the $128 nightly room rate, but it also listed “Tax Recovery & Fees” of $93.30 per night, or $279.90 for the three-night stay.  It is less than transparent.

Hotel taxes in Greenville are approximately 13 percent of the room rate. On a $128 room, that’s only less than $17 per night. The receipt doesn’t explain how much of the $93.30 taxes represented and how much the fees represented. It simply combines them into a single line item.  See the “Tax Recovery & Fees” above of  $279.90.

For three nights that is $93.30 per night.  Compare that with the “Nightly Rate” of $128.00 per night (the posted rate at the hotel those nights).  Simple math suggests that “fees” were about $77 per night on a posted rate of $128 per night.  So the “fees” were about 60% of the nightly rate.

I still don’t know how those charges were determined.  You be the judge of their reasonableness.

Then, I searched again. On my desktop computer, finding the Hampton Inn’s official website wasn’t difficult. On my iPhone, however, sponsored listings dominated the search results, making it much harder to distinguish the hotel’s website from third-party booking services. Looking back, I suspect that’s how I ended up booking through an intermediary rather than directly with the hotel.

A few months ago I wrote a series of posts about situational awareness. I was thinking about driving, walking, pickleball, and the challenges that become increasingly important as we grow older.  I wasn’t thinking about hotel reservations.  Maybe I should have been.

The internet has made booking a hotel easier than ever.  It has also made it easier than ever to believe you’re dealing directly with someone when you’re not.

There are search engines, sponsored listings, comparison sites, affiliate marketers, booking services, and AI-generated summaries. They can all be useful. But they also create layers of friction between us and the businesses we think we’re contacting.  That means awareness matters before we ever click a link.

Looking back, the lesson wasn’t really about hotels.  It was about awareness.

In a world filled with sponsored links, intermediaries, and websites that look similar to the real thing, paying attention has become a life skill.

Last week, my lapse in awareness cost me the price of an extra night’s hotel room.

Next time, it might save me one.

So, until next time, be situationally aware, and age gratefully,

Chris