Incidental Expenses

It’s vacay time and here we are, checking into our hotel in Key West (no relation to Kanye), ready for some seafoody goodness and fun in the sun. Even though we’ve already prepaid for our hotel room, the clerk asks us for a credit card to cover “incidentals.”

This isn’t unusual—it’s actually incredibly common—but what are “incidentals,” anyway?

They’re the extra little charges that can come along with larger charges. In our Key West hotel example, “incidentals” might refer to anything we eat or drink from our room’s minibar, or any meals in the hotel restaurant that we charge to our room. It can refer to damage charges we incur if we decide to go all ‘80s rock band and have a violent kegger with barnyard animals in our room. Or, if we take advantage of the hotel’s in-house dry cleaning services, it can refer to that, too. The key here is that they’re all extra charges we incur that are related to one activity: staying in the hotel.

We see incidental expenses outside of hotel rooms as well. Let’s say we throw a big fancy dinner for some of our favorite clients. The dinner tab is the main expense; the incidental expenses attached to it might include the tip for our servers and the Uber fare we paid to get there and back. Or...let’s say our car is stolen and, along with it, our mega-huge Case Logic book of CDs that we’ve been toting around in our backseat since 1996. The cost of replacing the car is the main expense, while the cost of replacing CDs is considered incidental.