1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Hotel Advertising Transparency Act of 2019 . 2. Findings Congress makes the following findings: (1) As of the day before the date of the enactment of this Act, hotel rooms and other places of lodging are often advertised at a rate and later in the buying process mandatory fees are disclosed that were not included in the advertised room rate. (2) The mandatory fees described in paragraph (1) are sometimes called by names such as resort fees , cleaning fees , or facility fees and they are all mandatory and charged by a place of short-term lodging in addition to advertised room rates. (3) The number of short-term lodging facilities that charged mandatory resort fees is growing. (4) Advertising that does not reflect the true mandatory cost of a stay at a place of short-term lodging is deceptive. (5) The Federal Trade Commission has authority under section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act ( 15 U.S.C. 45 ) to regulate and prohibit unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce. (6) In 2012 and 2013, the Federal Trade Commission exercised its authority under that section 5 to issue warning letters to 35 hotel operators and 11 online travel agents. In those letters, the Commission cautioned hotel operators and online travel agents that mandatory resort fees could confuse consumers in violation of section 5(a)(2) of such Act ( 15 U.S.C. 45(a)(2) ). (7) In 2017, an economist at the Federal Trade Commission published an issue paper that found that forcing consumers to click through additional webpages to see a hotel’s resort fee increases the time spent searching and learning the hotel’s price, and went on to state the following: Separating the room rate from the resort fee increases the cognitive costs of remembering the hotel’s price. When it becomes more costly to search and evaluate an additional hotel, a consumer’s choice is either to incur higher total search and cognitive costs or to make an incomplete, less informed decision that may result in a more