Picture this. You land in Marrakesh, drag your suitcase to the front desk, and hand over your card. The receptionist smiles and says there’s a fee to pay at the hotel. You paid online already, so you stare at them like they just asked for your left shoe.
That fee was in your booking email the whole time, buried in the small print. Nobody reads that part. A Reddit user in r/ChatGPTPromptGenius got tired of this exact moment and came up with a one-minute fix.
Why it matters 💸
The big number you see when you book is often not the full price. The poster looked at 2,702 hotel rates in Marrakesh. 45% of them had a fee you pay at the hotel on top of what you paid online. It usually sits in the fine print, far from the headline price.
The poster also gives a Las Vegas example. At The Cosmopolitan, the resort fee is about 55 a night, around 62 with tax. The 13.38% room tax comes on top of that. Multiply it by a week and you can see how a surprise at checkout becomes a real chunk of your budget.
AI is good at reading boring, dense text without getting tired. That’s the job here.
How-To Steps 🧭
- Book your hotel as usual. Wait for the confirmation email to land.
- Copy the whole email. Include the small print and the footer. The footer is where the good stuff hides.
- Paste it into your AI with this prompt:
“Here is my hotel booking confirmation email. Read all of it, including the small print, and give me a checklist with these sections:
- What I still have to pay at the hotel (fees, taxes, deposits, resort fee) and the amounts if they’re written.
- The last day and time I can cancel for free, and what happens after that date.
- What’s included in the rate (breakfast, wifi, parking) and what’s NOT included.
- What I need to bring or do before arrival (ID, card used for booking, check in time, late arrival rules).
- Anything that doesn’t match what I asked for: room type, number of guests, dates.
For every line, quote the exact words from the email. If something is not in the email, write ‘not in the email’, don’t guess. At the end, list the 3 things I should double check with the hotel.”
- Read the checklist. It takes about a minute. Check the quoted lines against your email if anything looks off.
- Send the hotel a message about whatever the AI flagged. The “3 things to double check” list at the end basically writes this message for you.
Tips & Tricks 🔧
Each part of the prompt is there for a reason, so don’t trim it too much.
- “Quote the exact words.” This makes the AI point at a real line in your email. You can verify it in five seconds, and it can’t invent things.
- “Not in the email.” A missing fee is the fee you want to ask the hotel about. A gap is useful. A guess is not.
- “Anything that doesn’t match what I asked for.” The poster added two kids (ages 5 and 9) to the same searches in Marrakesh, and the room and the total changed at all 14 hotels. Worth confirming the booking is for the room and guests you meant.
- Skip the copy paste. If your AI has a Gmail connector, just say: “Find my booking confirmation from [hotel] in my email and run this checklist on it.” It finds the email on its own.
- Go beyond the email. Some hidden fees aren’t in the email at all. To catch those, your AI needs to look at the live offer or at guest reviews that mention surprise charges. For that you can add a hotel connector as a custom connector in your AI’s settings by pasting a server URL. The poster uses Booking.com, Tripadvisor, Brek and LetsFG, and says any one of them works. If you use Claude, these are also in its directory for a one-click add.
A quick caution from me: connectors get access to your AI session, so only add ones you trust, and check the URLs in the original post rather than copying them from a random place. Also, the AI only knows what’s in the email. If the hotel changes a fee later, the checklist won’t know.
Your turn ⚓
Next time you book a hotel, take one minute before you close the confirmation email. Paste it in, read the checklist, and send the hotel your questions while you can still cancel for free. If you have something to add to the checklist, the original poster is asking for ideas in the comments, and I’d love to hear yours too.
How to use AI to save hundreds of $$$ in hotel fees with one prompt on your booking email
by u/Calm_Cartographer324 in ChatGPTPromptGenius