Be careful – Some IHG properties will charge you extra for double occupancy

I don’t stay at IHG properties very often so maybe this is only news to me, but did you know that some IHG properties will charge you more if there are two people staying in a room rather than just one?

Back in the dark depths of the 20th century, it wasn’t unusual to find hotels charging a “single person supplement” to anyone booking a room for just one person, but as that practice seems to have died out in most parts of the world (you may still see some European properties adding this supplement), I was under the impression that hotels no longer really discriminated between one-person and two-person bookings.

Apparently, I was wrong.

During a recent search for a hotel in Amsterdam, I noticed that the Kimpton De Witt was adding a $9.57 “extra person charge” to the booking when I selected “2 guests” for the room occupancy.

I didn’t recall noticing something like this before, so I decided to see if this was a Dutch/Amsterdam thing or if this practice was more widespread.

The next two Amsterdam IHG properties I choose to check didn’t appear to be penalising guests for having the audacity to travel as a couple, so I threw my net a little wider and checked what IHG had to offer in Berlin.

The first property I selected (InterContinental Berlin) didn’t add a surcharge when I did a dummy booking for two people, but the second did.

Here’s what the Garner Hotel Berlin – Gendarmenmarkt wanted to charge for double occupancy:

$16.22 may not seem like much, but keep in mind that this a nightly surcharge and that it makes a double occupancy booking ~10% more expensive than a single occupancy booking. That’s not insignificant.

My next thought was that this may be a European thing, so I decided to check properties further afield.

I chose Tokyo, and the very first IHG Tokyo property at which I made a dummy booking (Kimpton Shinjuku) wanted to charge an extra $24.02/night for a room with double occupancy.

At the next two properties I checked (Hotel Indigo Tokyo Shibuya and the ANA InterContinental Tokyo) there was no surcharge, but the InterContinental Tokyo Bay wanted an extra $10.38 (~4%) for the night I chose.

Apparently, IHG properties in Africa and South America are also not immune to this surcharge.

Here’s the InterContinental Sao Paulo charging $24.14 (6.8%) more for a double occupancy booking …

… and here is the InterContinental Table Bay Cape Town also charging more for double occupancy.

How is this a thing?!

I tried searching the same cities on the Hyatt, Marriott, and Hilton websites, but none of those searches threw up a property which showed a surcharge for double occupancy, so this may just be an IHG thing and it’s an thing that I don’t understand.

If I was making a booking which included breakfast or if I was making a booking as someone with an elite status that’s gives everyone in my room access to benefits that would see a property incur added costs, I could see why some hotels would add a second person supplement.

I wouldn’t like it and I wouldn’t agree with it, but I would be able to see the reasoning behind it.

That, however, is not the case.

All of the dummy bookings were made while I was logged out of my IHG One Rewards account (even if I had logged in, my Platinum elite status would have been unlikely to cause any concerns as it doesn’t entitle me to much!) and all the rates I chose were the cheapest rates going which didn’t include any meals and which did not offer any flexibility, so there’s no obvious justification for the extra fee.

If you take a step back and think about it, a double occupancy surcharge makes no sense. If anything, the properties should be encouraging double occupancy.

Two people staying at a hotel are more likely to spend more on food and drinks than a solo traveler, and as the F&B part of a hotel’s operations are where some of the best margins are to be found, where’s the logic in charging an extra fee for double occupancy?

If all the properties in the same geographical area applied the same surcharge, I guess you could argue that the surcharge was a simple way for these hotels to gouge their customers, but that’s not what’s happening here.

In each of these locations, there are dozens of other (equal or better) properties that aren’t charging a double occupancy supplement, so why would a hotel’s management choose to make their property less appealing by adding a supplement that potential customers can avoid simply by booking the property next door?

I really don’t get it, but I’m not going to waste any more of my time thinking about it.

As I said at the beginning, I don’t stay at IHG properties very often, so this weird surcharge isn’t going to make much difference to my travels, but now that I know that it exists, I’ll be looking out for it the next time Joanna and I need somewhere to stay, and if I choose to see what IHG has to offer, I’ll be avoiding any hotels that think a double occupancy surcharge is an appropriate thing to add to the bill.

Did you know about this surcharge? If you did, have you seen it being charged by any Hyatt, Marriott, or Hilton properties or is this just an IHG thing?