That's just the excuse for doing it. But tax rates are known ahead of time, they could just add the tax to the price and put it on the sticker, just like pretty

That's just the excuse for doing it. But tax rates are known ahead of time, they could just add the tax to the price and put it on the sticker, just like pretty much every other place in the world does. In my opinion, it's a very deceiving practice that could definitely be fixed if businesses really wanted to fix it. But there's no incentive, because if you show your prices including tax and fees, they'll seem more expensive than the competition. In the case of hotels, my experience is that with a lot of them you book online, pay the total, but then when you go check out, they've added some extra fees. Sometimes this happens before booking, you browse the options and choose based on price, but when you go check out, the total has changed because they've added not only taxes but some other fees as well. My most recent experience having this issue was with AirBnb just two days ago.