Jul. 7--When George Ferko visited Kansas City last week as an adult adviser for the SkillsUSA-VICA championships, he placed four calls home to Somerset, Pa., from his room at the Westin Crown Center hotel. 

Ferko didn't give those calls a second thought until he was checking out of the hotel at the end of the week. As he scanned his room bill, the phone charges jumped off the page: 

-- 19 minutes: $45.01 

-- 16 minutes: $38.83 

-- Five minutes: $16.17 

-- Three minutes: $12.05 

"That's very, very high," Ferko said. "It adds up to quite a bit of money." 

But what really upset him, Ferko said, was that he found no information in his room warning of the steep phone charges. 

"This is when we found out, when we were checking out," he said. "Those prices should have been posted somewhere in the room." 

John Everett, acting general manager at the Westin, said pricing information is posted in guest rooms. And he makes no apology for those rates -- including Ferko's $45 call. 

"We feel the pricing structure is competitive with other hotels out there," he said. 

But Everett refused to disclose details about the hotel's per-call surcharge and per-minute markup on call charges. 

Westin's telephone policies and prices, he said, are set by corporate headquarters in White Plains, N.Y., and he referred questions there. The Westin is part of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. 

Mark Ricci, a Starwood spokesman, also would not provide specifics on company pricing practices. He said Starwood standardized its telephone rates systemwide last October. 

Tina Edmundsen, a Starwood operations vice president, said customer phone rates were now set at three levels, with the Kansas City Westin in the highest-priced tier. 

Starwood owns or manages more than 725 lodging properties, including the Sheraton, Westin and W brands, in 80 countries. 

Other downtown Kansas City lodging properties have similar pricing practices. 

Brad Grimes, general manager at the Holiday Inn Citi Centre, said hotels must add surcharges, markups or both to guest calls to cover their costs for equipment and long-distance service contracts. 

But some hotels go beyond the break-even point, Grimes said. 

"Some hotels do see it as a profit center," he said, especially those that handle a lot of corporate business. 

"We try to be right in the middle," Grimes said. "We don't want to be the highest one in the market, but we want to cover our costs." 

Grimes said his Holiday Inn added a 90 percent markup to all long-distance toll calls, plus a $1.55 surcharge per call. 

Grimes said he had recently lowered the cost of local calls to 75 cents from 95 cents. 

"I thought 95 cents was too high" and so did guests, he said. 

The Hyatt Regency Crown Center hotel charges all guests a $1 access fee for every call made, plus a 25-cent-per-minute surcharge on all long-distance toll calls, said Mark Champa, sales and marketing director. 

The hotel posts its prices in guest rooms "right next to the phone," he said. 

Ferko said other guests he saw around the Westin checkout desk last Saturday morning also were steaming over their phone bills. 

The three-minute call on Ferko's room bill was placed by his student, Andrew Rosenbaum, 18, to his family Friday morning. 

The youth placed the call at the urging of SkillsUSA officials to all 4,000 competitors after the suicide of a Pennsylvania youth at the Westin hotel. 

Mary Ann Rosenbaum said she was relieved to hear from her son. But "I just thought it was outrageous," she said of the $12.05 tab for their brief conversation. 

Likewise, Ferko said he was "appalled" to pay $45 for a 19-minute chat with his wife. 

"If I knew it was going to cost that much, I wouldn't have talked as long as I did," he said. 

A Sprint long-distance operator on Friday quoted a basic, nondiscounted long-distance rate from Kansas City to Pennsylvania at a flat rate of 37 cents per minute, or $7.03 for a 19-minute call. An AT&T long-distance operator quoted a flat rate of 30 cents per minute for the same call, for a charge of $5.70. 

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