Drip pricing

Drip pricing is a schedule, not a price. The number in the advert is real, in the sense that some part of what you pay is that number, and every fee added afterwards is disclosed somewhere before the card is charged. What makes it a dark pattern is the ordering. The cheap number does the work of winning the click and the comparison; the mandatory additions arrive after seats have been chosen, details typed, and enough effort spent that starting over somewhere else feels worse than paying. By the time the total is true, the decision it was supposed to inform has already been made.

The giveaway is that the fees are not optional and not avoidable. A resort fee charged to every guest is part of the room rate with a different name on it. A service fee on every ticket is part of the ticket price. The test a regulator applies is the same one a designer should: if nobody can complete the purchase without paying it, it belongs in the advertised number. Economists studying partitioned pricing have found for decades that splitting a price into a base plus surcharges makes buyers underestimate the total and rate it as better value than the identical all in figure, which is precisely why the practice persists without anyone technically lying.

Enforcement caught up in the 2020s. US rules now require ticketing and short term lodging sellers to show the total price including mandatory fees up front, the Federal Trade Commission has acted against airline and hotel style fee disclosure, and EU and UK consumer law has long required the total payable to be given before a buyer commits. The practical effect is that a checkout which discovers new fees per step is now a legal question in several markets, not only an ethical one.

The honest version already has a name and a shape: the order summary that stands beside the form from the first step, itemising every line including the ones a seller would rather not name. The rule that separates them is easy to state. A total may change because the reader changed something, a quantity, a delivery speed, a seat. A total may not change because the seller advanced the step. Put the all in figure in the headline, keep the breakdown one tap away for anyone who wants to see where it goes, and let the comparison be won on a number that is still true at the end.