Dan Cole checked out of his Connecticut hotel early on a Saturday morning last month and found an unwelcome surprise. The Courtyard Marriott Hartford-Farmington had slapped him with a $250 charge for smoking in his nonsmoking room. Mr. Cole is a smoker but insists he didn't light up in the room. He got busted, he thinks, for throwing a few cigarette butts he had stowed in his pants pocket into the room's trash.

He pleaded his case to the front desk, but the clerk refused to take off the charge. The next day, Mr. Cole fired off a series of increasingly exasperated e-mails to customer service and the general manager. "Would you like me to take a polygraph to prove to you that I am not a liar?" he e-mailed Chris O'Donnell, the hotel's general manager.

Mr. Cole is among the growing crowd of smokers ensnared by hotels' new and more stringent no-smoking policies. More hotels are starting to introduce fines for smoking, are increasing fines or are beginning to more aggressively enforce those that are already on the books. As more hotels institute 100 percent smoke-free policies, hotels say the fines are necessary to get people to stop lighting up and to cover cleaning costs for those who won't. Nonsmoking guests, they say, are getting more sensitive about smelling any hint of cigarette smoke in a nonsmoking room.

Last week, Sheraton and Four Points by Sheraton, divisions of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., announced all of its North American properties will have a $200 smoking charge when the brands become 100 percent nonsmoking at the end of 2008. Walt Disney Co.'s Walt Disney World Resort hotels started applying a new smoking charge of as much as $500 in June 2007, when the brand became totally nonsmoking. Swissotel Chicago started charging $175 for smoking in a nonsmoking room in the beginning of 2007 but raised the charge to $250 when it announced a 100 percent nonsmoking policy in December.

A charge of "$175 wasn't quite enough to get people to stop," says Nicole Jachimiak, marketing director for the hotel. Ms. Jachimiak says the steeper fine seems to be working: The hotel is now catching -- and fining -- fewer smokers.

The American Hotel & Lodging Association found that 74 percent of hotel rooms in the U.S. were nonsmoking in 2006, up from 65 percent in 2001. Several large hotel chains, including Marriott International Inc.'s Marriott and Starwood's Westin, are 100 percent nonsmoking in North America.

With so many hotels going totally nonsmoking, the odds are that smokers often end up in a nonsmoking room. And since many hotels ban smoking on balconies and in common areas, smokers sometimes find that there is no comfortable place they can safely light up. At the Westin Chicago River North, an ashtray is placed 15 feet from the entrance. "Even when it's seven degrees, people are huddled around that ashtray," says General Manager Peter Simoncelli.

So some smokers continue to indulge in their rooms. Pete Curie, a 30-year-old helicopter mechanic from Nova Scotia, says: "I've smoked a lot in nonsmoking rooms." But he says he has never been fined. He believes his use of a plastic cup filled with water as an ashtray and/or an open window keeps him out of trouble.

Since proving that a particular guest is responsible for a whiff of smoke can be difficult, hotels will often waive the fee if a guest insists on his or her innocence. "We don't want to really upset guests, leave a bad taste in their mouth," explains Karen Colliton-Thomson, marketing director of the Westin New York at Times Square.

Indeed, Mr. O'Donnell of the Courtyard Marriott Hartford-Farmington sent Mr. Cole an email less then a week after the dispute saying Marriott would refund the money, "based on the fact that you have been inconvenienced by the gap in communication." But Mr. Cole, who travels four or five times a month, says he will "never stay at a Marriott again" because he feels that Marriott didn't believe him. During a telephone conversation this week, Mr. O'Donnell said: "I was taking him at his word."

Some hotels seek out actual physical evidence before they levy a fine. The New York Marriott Downtown first started charging people $250 for simply leaving the smell of smoke in their rooms after the brand went 100 percent nonsmoking in Sept. 2006. Within a few weeks, they realized they had too many complaints, says Anna Cervenyak, the hotel's office manager. Security started taking pictures of butts or ashes when housekeeping found them. Though they still make "plenty" of refunds, they now show people physical evidence, which usually is enough to draw a confession, Ms. Cervenyak says.

Physical evidence also plays a role when a guest tries to protest against the charge through a credit-card company. Sam Patel, who owns the Quality Inn Brick Town in Oklahoma City, says, "A lot of times you have to argue with the credit-card company" to have a smoking charge accepted. "If you don't find a cigarette," he says, the charge will not go through, and "we lose money." he says.

At least one hotel gives employees an incentive to catch illicit smokers: Swissotel Chicago awards housekeepers a $10 bonus for every smoker they catch.

Sometimes, guests won't know they have been charged until after they have left the property. The Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers used to make sure that guests knew they would be fined $200 before their departure, says General Manager Rick Ueno. But early this year, the hotel put signs in rooms warning there will be a charge for smoking. Now they will charge guilty guests even if they have left, says Mr. Ueno, though the hotel will send an email or letter informing the customer of the fine.

Mr. Ueno says their previous requirement let a lot of smokers slip out without any consequences, since telltale evidence was often not found by housekeepers until the guest was long gone. Under the old policy, Mr. Ueno believes that only about 30 percent of the people they suspected of smoking were actually fined.

Some guests don't know they have been fined until they see the unexpected charge on their credit-card statements. Rick Meyerhoefer stayed in a Fairfield Inn in Kearny, Neb., in July last year but realized he had been charged $250 for smoking only after seeing his August corporate-credit-card statement. He sent an email to the hotel, a Marriott brand, explaining that he didn't smoke in his room. The money was refunded, but the smoker from Vancouver says he will try to avoid Marriott in the future.

The general manager at the Fairfield Inn, Jenifer Koehn, didn't return messages left on her voice mail. Roger Connor, a spokesperson for Marriott, says, "If there was no effort" to contact Mr. Meyerhoefer, "that would be in error."

The cost to a hotel for cleaning up after a smoker can vary widely. If there is a light smoke smell in a room, many hotels simply put an ozone machine in the room for a few hours, which costs "a few pennies," says Tom Jones, an assistant professor of hotel operations at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who specializes in housekeeping.

But when a room smells heavily or a hotel is particularly worried about smoke smell, it might clean everything -- drapes, bedding, carpet, air-conditioning filters and walls. A deep clean could cost more then $1,000, says Mr. Jones, including the lost revenue from taking the room out of service for a day or two.

Smokers gripe that the fines are just another example of how little attention is paid to their comfort as guests. "I don't like that my husband smokes," explains Linda Somach, a psychologist from Staten Island, "but I don't think him walking outside each time" he wants to smoke "is much of a vacation for him." They try to stay in hotels that allow smoking on room balconies. Ritz Carlton, for example, will let guests smoke on its "deeper" balconies. The Four Seasons doesn't have smoking fines.

But one step down on the luxury hierarchy, smokers usually get the bare minimum. At the Westin New York at Times Square, a 100 percent smoke-free hotel, smokers have a spot to stand at the edge of 43rd and 8th Ave. There is no seating, but "it is under a canopy," says Ms. Colliton-Thomson, the hotel's marketing director.

Ms. Colliton-Thomson says she thinks the fine, along with a clear communication strategy about the hotel's nonsmoking policy, has worked well. Guests, she says, think "is $200 worth it to me to go outside in my PJs when it is 20 degrees outside?"

 

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