Right now if you want a mid-week room in Las Vegas, you can book one at the Excalibur for as little as $27 a night. A great price? Maybe not. If you look closer, you'll find that that price doesn't include room taxes (13.35%) and a few other add-ons, most notably the Resort Fee. At some point in the booking process, you will probably but not certainly notice that at the Excalibur, the Resort Fee is $39.68 a night, way more than doubling the price of that bargain room. At some other hotels in town, it could run as high as $45.
What do you get for your Resort Fee? Well, it varies from hotel to hotel. You might get access to their Fitness Center, which you probably won't use. Some days, you might get a free newspaper you won't read. You'll probably get free local phone calls, which won't matter because you'll be using your cell phone. You might get a free bottle or two of water that costs them about half a buck.
You might also get to print the boarding pass for your flight home, saving you the thirty seconds it would take to do that at the airport. That's assuming you even want a boarding pass on paper. I find the one on my phone app to be more efficient in every way.
At a lot of hotels, your Resort Fee gets you free notary service…and I don't know about you but when I'm in Vegas, I always have a lot of papers I need notarized. I don't gamble there these days but if I did and I lost, say, a thousand bucks, I'd be comforted by the fact that I could make it back by getting a hundred or so escrow documents notarized along with eating about ten entire prime ribs at the buffet.
The Resort Fee does usually include one item that might be useful to you: Access to the hotel's wi-fi. There's often an additional charge for high-speed wi-fi but even the slow kind might be nice to have…except that you wouldn't pay $45 a day for it.
For some reason, most of the hotels list a separate price for the wi-fi service that everyone gets as part of the mandatory Resort Fee. The price for it is sometimes the same as the Resort Fee and sometimes, it's less even though no one staying there is going to pay that amount for it. I don't understand this at all.
But the big problem with Resort Fees is that they presume everyone is dumb enough to think that that they're paying that $27 price for a hotel room that actually costs eighty-three bucks. It's like how a lot of folks who go out and buy a car haven't learned not to decide they've found the one to buy until they hold a piece of paper with an "out the door" price that includes prep fees, tax and licensing, delivery charges, document fees, Additional Dealer Profit fees, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They fall in love with the sticker price and by the time they realize their $16,000 car costs $19,457.77, they're in too deep to get out.
Last time I booked a stay in Vegas, Harrah's offered me a free room. All I had to do was pony up the Resort Fees. It was still the cheapest deal I could get for a decent room but it sure as heck wasn't — as they insisted it was — a "free room."