Why are the mandatory local surcharges and facility fees for the SeaTac Rental Car Facility hidden from the base rate?

When renting a vehicle from the SeaTac Rental Car Facility, travelers are frequently confronted with a pricing practice known as drip pricing, where standard online base rates fail to reflect the true total cost of the reservation. Specifically, these advertised base rates deliberately omit two significant mandatory charges. The first is the 17. 2% King County and Washington State rental surcharge, which is applied to the gross rental price to fund local transportation infrastructure and regulatory oversight. The second is the mandatory $6. 00 per day Customer Facility Charge (CFC), which finances the construction, operation, and maintenance of the consolidated Rental Car Facility at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Because these fees are not integrated into the initial daily or weekly rate displayed on search engines or booking platforms, customers are often misled by the seemingly low upfront pricing. It is not until the final checkout screen—often after entering personal and payment details—that the 17. 2% surcharge and the $6. 00 daily CFC are itemized and added to the total. For a standard 5-day rental, this means an unexpected addition of $30. 00 in CFCs alone, plus nearly a fifth of the base rate in state surcharges, significantly inflating the final payment and eroding consumer trust due to this lack of upfront transparency.