Sneaky fees in Niagara Falls; New Netflix prices: CBC’s Marketplace cheat sheet

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Heading to Niagara Falls? You may need to budget a bit more because of these sneaky fees

Investigating extra fees tacked on to bills in Niagara Falls

3 days ago

Duration2:12

Marketplace journalists go undercover to investigate sneaky fees added to bills in Niagara Falls.

With around 14 million visitors annually, Niagara Falls is already a potential cash cow to the many area businesses serving tourists. But at some of them, visitors are finding contentious fees added to their bills — and CBC Marketplace has found they’re growing.

If noticed at all, tourists typically see the fees next to the provincial sales tax, or the city’s municipal accommodation tax.

Tourists and critics say that placement on the bill gives the appearance of a government-mandated charge. But that is not the case.

“It’s going to the owner” of the business, said Janice Thomson, president and CEO of Niagara Falls Tourism.

Just as there is no consistency in how much is charged — Marketplace found the fees ranged from three to 12 per cent — there is no single name for the added fees. They can be known as NFDF (Niagara Falls Destination Fee), TIF (Tourism Improvement Fee), or even LF (Luxury Fee), among many others.

While they are not charged at every hotel, restaurant or attraction, random spot checks conducted by Marketplace over nearly a decade show the number of businesses adding fees to customer bills is growing, as is the amount being charged.

Critics of added fees say they lack transparency, particularly when an array of names are used. Many visitors may not know what the acronyms stand for, and the Marketplace spot check elicited sometimes conflicting accounts of what the fees are for. Read more

Marketplace has an all-new hidden camera investigation that digs into these extra fees to learn what customers are being told they’re for. Plus, we take a closer look at gift cards that decline in value, and a chain restaurant with an extra fee many diners find not-so-honest. Catch it on CBC TV and CBC Gem.

Netflix rolls out new fees for password sharing in Canada

Streaming giant Netflix said it would begin notifying Canadian users last Thursday by email about limitations on who can access their account outside their household.

The good news is if you want to continue sharing your account outside of your household, you can. The bad news is there’s a cost — an extra $8 per month.

There are also some other new rules: An ad-supported plan that can be used by one person on one device in one location will cost $5.99 a month.

The same basic plan without ads will cost $9.99 a month.

Under what the company calls its “standard” plan for $16.99 a month, a user can watch on two devices at the same time, but they must be in the same physical location. If they want to watch in different locations — at a parent’s home and a college-aged child’s dorm room, for example, or between two members of a couple who live apart — there will be an extra fee of $7.99 a month.

The standard plan will be limited to one additional user.

The “premium” plan allows four users to watch at once, for $20.99 a month, but it will also have an extra $7.99 fee for every additional user in a new location, up to two. That would bring the monthly price for the most-expensive Netflix package to roughly $35 a month, if it includes two members.

Netflix has roughly 250 million paying customers around the world, and the company says about 100 million of them currently share their passwords. Read more

Are you being inundated by subscriptions? Having trouble keeping track of all those monthly charges? We want to hear about it. Write to us at marketplace@cbc.ca.

A new study finds electric vehicles lose up to 30% of their range when temperatures dip below freezing

A study from Seattle based-company Recurrent tested 7,000 electric vehicles (EVs) at temperatures between -7 C and -1 C.

Bad news for Canadians — the range of the vehicles dropped in chilly temperatures.

At the low end, the Jaguar I-Pace had an estimated range loss of three per cent, while the Volkswagen ID.4 had a 30 per cent range loss at those temperatures.

Liz Najman, a researcher with Recurrent, said EVs lose range during the winter because of the energy it takes to heat the cabin so it’s comfortable for the driver and passengers.

Because electric motors are more efficient than gas engines, they can’t draw on wasted heat to warm up the inside of the vehicle.

“If you’ve ever touched the hood of a gas car, you know it’s really hot after it’s been driving,” Najman said.

“And that’s because gasoline engines are super inefficient, and so they create all of this waste heat. And when you turn the car on in a gas car, you just funnel all of that heat from the engine to the cabin.”

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