A newspaper is delivered to your door and a charge for it appears on your bill, whether you want it or not. The availability of a safe for your valuables results in an extra fee, whether you used it or not. A "resort" charge for the fitness room causes $4 a day to be added to your bill, whether you entered that facility or not. As hotels cope with lower occupancy rates and a slowing economy, the number of extra fees added to your check-out bill grows at an alarming rate. Some guests find as much as $40 and $50 added to the charge for a two-night stay.

The constant creation of new, unadvertised, unannounced extra hotel charges has reached such a pace that an NYU professor of tourism and travel, Bjorn Hanson, now publishes frequently about the matter, which he believes has grown to crisis proportions. (Pauline and I interviewed Professor Hanson on our recent Sunday radio show). He also believes that the practice is deceitful, a blemish on the ethical record of large hotel chains, a reprehensible practice.

What can you do to guard against it? He recommends that you quiz the hotel reservationist who has accepted your booking, and require that he or she categorically state that there will be no extra unexpected charges added to your bill. He suggests that you then take down the name of the reservationist with whom you have spoken, and also record any other points that arose in your discussion with that reservationist. Thereafter, if you discover additional, unannounced fees added to your bill when you check out, you can convincingly quote the assurances you received that there would be no such extra charges. And you can demand that these charges be removed.

This, of course, is not an infallible tactic. It would better to obtain the guarantee in writing. But in the usual case, the approach should suffice to have these extra charges eliminated from your bill.

And if you believe that I am exaggerating the problem, just wait until your next hotel stay when $40 extra is added to your bill for services you never requested or used. It is becoming more and more important that the possibility of such charges be headed off in the first conversation you have with that hotel, on the occasion of making your reservation.