Do Denver Hotels Charge Resort Fees?

Which Denver hotels charge a destination fee?

Fewer than the aggregator lists suggest. Verified directly from the hotels' own websites: The CrawfordBook charges $30 plus tax per day, and The Maven at Dairy BlockBook and The Rally HotelBook both charge $28 plus tax per room per night. All three are LoDo properties, which is the pattern worth noticing — the fee clusters in the ballpark district rather than across downtown.

Just as usefully, several major downtown hotels publish no destination fee at all on their own sites — the Hilton Denver City CenterBook, The Curtis, The Brown Palace and the Embassy Suites Convention Center all list parking charges and nothing else. If a comparison site tells you one of those charges a resort fee, check the hotel's own page before you believe it.

Third-party fee databases list around twenty-five Denver properties with fees in the $20 to $41 range, but those figures usually appear to include tax, which is why they do not match what the hotels themselves quote. Treat them as leads to check, not as prices.

What does a Denver destination fee actually cover?

Typically a bundle of things you may or may not use: wifi, a fitness center credit, a drink or coffee credit, bike rental, local calls. The fee is mandatory whether you use any of it or not, which is what separates it from a genuine add-on.

It is worth being clear-eyed about the economics. A destination fee lets a hotel advertise a lower nightly rate while collecting the same total, and historically it also kept some revenue out of the base rate for commission and comparison purposes. The FTC rule addressed the advertising half of that problem; it did not abolish the fee.

What did the FTC rule change?

The FTC's Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees took effect on May 12, 2025. It covers short-term lodging and live-event ticketing, and requires the total price including all mandatory fees to be disclosed clearly and up front, at every stage of the booking process. It does not ban any fee or cap any amount.

That distinction matters and gets misreported constantly. Resort and destination fees are still entirely legal. What changed is that they must be in the number you see when you are comparing, rather than appearing after you have committed. If you are seeing a rate on a booking site that jumps at the final screen, that is the thing the rule was written about.

Does Colorado have its own law?

Yes. Colorado HB25-1090, Protections Against Deceptive Pricing Practices, was signed on April 21, 2025 and took effect January 1, 2026. It requires businesses to clearly and conspicuously disclose the maximum total price when advertising, and prohibits misrepresenting pricing.

The bill carves out exemptions for food service, broadband providers, delivery companies and real estate services. Lodging is not among the exemptions, and hospitality law practices have read it as applying to hotels — though the statute does not name lodging explicitly, so we are describing the exemption list rather than making a legal claim of our own.

The practical upshot for a visitor is the same either way: from 2026, the advertised Denver hotel price should be the price.

How do you check before booking?

Open the hotel's own website and look for a page called Amenities, Hotel Information or Getting Here — that is where Denver hotels put both parking and destination fees, and it is the only source that is both current and authoritative. Aggregator fee databases go stale and usually include tax.

• •Search the hotel's own site for "destination fee", "amenity fee" or "resort fee" — the exact wording varies and the fee hides under all three.
• •Check the parking page at the same time. Parking is the larger number at almost every downtown Denver hotel, and it is usually treated as optional rather than mandatory, so it may not be in the advertised total.
• •Compare the final booking total, not the nightly rate. Post-2025 that number should include mandatory fees, which makes it the only honest comparison across properties.
• •If a fee appears at check-in that was not in your booking total, that is now a disclosure problem rather than a matter of hotel policy — raise it at the desk.