Hide the Fee, 75% Pay. Show It, 15%.

Introduction

Hopper ran the same experiment on its own customers more than once, and the results are now sitting in a federal complaint. Disclose a "Tip" fee and leave the box unchecked, and 15% of people paid it. Hide that same fee at the bottom of the checkout screen and pre-check the box, and 75% paid it (FTC Complaint ¶42). Same fee, same trip, five times the money, and the only thing that changed was whether you could see it. If you booked a flight, hotel, or rental car through the Hopper app any time in the last six years, there's a real chance one of those charges, a "Tip" or a "VIP Support" fee you never knowingly agreed to, is sitting in a line item you'd have needed to scroll down to catch. On July 2, the FTC said Hopper agreed to hand back $35 million for it.

The Screen You Had to Scroll to See

Hopper didn't stumble into this. The company ran the numbers, watched what disclosure did to its revenue, and kept the hidden version anyway because, in its own staff's words, the fees were "100% of the gross profit that our air business derives."

Here's how the charge worked. From 2020 through mid-2023, a customer booking a flight would reach the final screen, tap "Swipe to Book Flight," and get billed two fees that never appeared in the total price they'd been quoted: a pre-selected "Tip" of $3 or more, and a "VIP Support" customer-service fee running $10 to $42 on flights, $9 to $25 on hotels, and $9 flat on car rentals. Both sat below the fold. If you didn't scroll down and un-check them, you paid them. The FTC's complaint, filed July 2 in federal court in Massachusetts, describes the whole arrangement as a system for charging people without their consent.

After mid-2023, Hopper moved the Tip fee onto a screen that only appears once you've already paid, offering three pre-filled amounts of $1, $5, or $9 and no visible "no thanks" button, just a small "X" in the corner. The complaint says that redesigned flow still fails to tell customers the Tip is optional, which is why two of the six counts cover Hopper's current app and not only its pandemic-era one. That distinction matters, because Hopper's whole public defense rests on the claim that this is ancient history.

Hopper agreed to pay the $35 million as a proposed settlement, not a fine, all of it earmarked for consumer redress rather than a civil penalty, in 12 installments that run into 2027. No individual executive is named or personally liable; it's a corporate-only order. And there's no claims website yet. The FTC says it will identify and pay affected customers directly, using data Hopper is required to turn over.

The Numbers Hopper Ran Before It Chose

The thing that moves this from "app charged junk fees" to something colder is that Hopper measured it first. In a 2018 experiment laid out in the complaint, the company put four versions of the Tip fee side by side. Disclosed and left unchecked, 15% of customers paid. Disclosed and pre-checked, 25%. Hidden and unchecked, 8%. Hidden and pre-checked, 75%. The version that collected from the most people was the one where the fewest of them knew they were being charged.

They kept testing. When Hopper tried setting the Tip to off-by-default in 2023, tip payments fell 98% on flights, 80% on hotels, and 93% on car rentals. The VIP Support fee behaved the same way: conversion dropped from 36.6% when the fee was hidden and pre-selected to 1.8% once customers had to opt in, and as low as 1.17% when the fee was disclosed with the free tier pre-checked instead. A manager ran the math on making it optional, estimated a loss of "$6.60 in air revenue per transaction" and a 13% hit to conversion, and concluded: "it's material."

So Hopper didn't fix it. In late 2023, per the complaint, the company "rolled back some of the temporary compliance steps they had taken, which had included suspending the fees, because of the costs involved," meaning the version that actually stopped overcharging people cut too far into revenue to keep.

None of this was small money. The complaint attributes VIP Support revenue of $12.9 million in 2021, $30.3 million in 2022, and $24.4 million in 2023, with the Tip fee adding several million more on top of each of those years.

The two fees weren't the only problem. Hopper also sold a paid product called Price Freeze, a charge to lock in a fare, that the complaint says misrepresented what buyers were actually getting. An internal "Fee Awareness" document found that 62% of customers didn't understand the product had a price cap, and 45% wrongly believed the fee was refundable.

What stays with me is the internal chatter. One employee wrote she was "struggling to see how we view this as anything but deceptive UX." Another, quoted in the FTC's press release, put it plainly: "the problem here is that we're tricking users." A staffer who forgot to toggle off VIP Support on her own booking wrote afterward that she'd "felt cheated" by Hopper. And a 2022 internal deck found that 29% of the app's negative reviews called Hopper a scam.

Who Actually Banked the Fees

Start with Hopper, the obvious one. Money is the motive, and the complaint doesn't leave it to inference: the company said internally it needed the Tip fee because it was "a meaningful percentage of our gross profit," and needed VIP Support because it was "100% of the gross profit that our air business derives." When a fee is the entire margin on a product line, telling customers about it up front puts the product itself at risk. That's why the tests kept circling back to concealment, and why the fixes got rolled back.

Then there's Capital One, which is not a defendant here and was not accused by the FTC of anything. Its stake is financial. Capital One had led an earlier round and then put another $96 million into Hopper in a follow-on investment announced November 7, 2022, the same year the hidden VIP Support fee hit its $30.3 million peak. The bank also ran its own booking portal, "Capital One Travel, Powered by Hopper," on Hopper's engine from December 2021 until it brought that platform in-house in early 2026 (now an API-only relationship, with Capital One still Hopper's largest business customer).

I want to be careful about what that does and doesn't mean. Nothing in the FTC record says Capital One's own travel portal used the same "Tip" and "VIP Support" toggles, and the case is about Hopper's consumer app, full stop. But when your largest investor's return rides on a company whose peak-revenue years the government has now formally described as built on deception, that deception is part of what the $96 million was buying.

Hopper Is Not the Only Name on This List

This reads as a pattern rather than a one-off because the FTC has been working through the travel and ticketing business fee by fee. Its Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees took effect May 12, 2025, requiring that the all-in price, fees included, be shown up front for short-term lodging and live-event tickets. Two days after it landed, the agency warned StubHub; by April 2026, StubHub had agreed to a $10 million settlement. Texas's attorney general pried $9.5 million out of Booking Holdings over hidden hotel charges. The FTC and seven states sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster over drip pricing in September 2025, and that case is still live.

Hopper's answer to all of this is that it's old news. The company told TechCrunch the settlement "does not reflect the merit of the claims" and framed the conduct as "primarily outdated display practices implemented during the pandemic," discontinued in mid-2023 before the FTC ever inquired. It also notes, accurately, that its consumer app is now a small slice of its business, with more than 90% of revenue coming from selling travel technology to enterprise clients. But the complaint says the post-2023 redesign kept hiding that the Tip was optional, and the agency's press release states that "since 2023, Hopper has continued to fail to disclose that Tip fees were optional." The "we stopped in 2023" defense runs straight into the government's claim that they didn't.

Here's the through-line I keep landing on. In every one of these cases, the fix is the same, and it's almost insultingly simple: show people the real price, fees included, before they pay. Companies fight it not because disclosure is hard, but because disclosure works. Hopper's own A/B tests are the cleanest proof of that anyone has handed a regulator in a while. That 15%-versus-75% swing is a direct measurement of how many people a company can charge for something they'd have declined if they'd seen it coming.

The Bottom Line

Add up only the fees the complaint pins to 2021, 2022, and 2023 (the Tip and VIP Support charges together) and you clear $85 million. The agreed redress is less than half that, paid in installments stretching into 2027, to customers the FTC still has to locate through a claims process that doesn't exist yet. For a lot of people who got charged, the real-world result of this settlement may be a check they never receive for a fee they never noticed.

The open question was never whether Hopper broke the rules; its own experiments settled that before the FTC showed up. What's unsettled is whether $35 million, less than the design pulled in over three years, is enough to change the math for the next company weighing whether a pre-checked box is worth more than an honest screen. Right now the honest read is that it isn't, and the next version of this test is already running somewhere.

This story is developing: the settlement is a proposed order awaiting the court's entry, and the FTC has not yet opened a consumer-redress claims process.