The alternative to forbidding price gouging would be to publicize every company that does it.
You bring up a few good points, but maybe what is needed is a natural disaster plan that includes agreeable per person rates at the hotels. The participating companies can annually sit down and set the rates by negotiating with the towns and cities in which they operate.
Individuals can negotitate -- at the point of sale or usage, hooray! But once politicians do so, it becomes expensive and produces spotty, flakey results. And once BUREAUCRACIES get established to set rates -- we are destroyed. And service will be TERRIBLE.
don't you see, setting any arbitary rate will set limit on how much products can be delivered.
Simply economics.
at higher prices, more goods are available.
at lower prices, less good are available.
higher prices are even more critical at the time of emergency.
these submits for the emergency planning is good but the emergency by nature are event that can't be well-enough planned. How do you really prepare for Earth Quake, Tornado, ect.? You can take precautions but to say, we can plan such a event would conclude that we can control the event thus control the supply of goods/services well ahead of time. Unlike customers that are looking for water and food, whom are relatively constant, natural disasters aren't.
read Thomas Sowell's Basic Economic.
Very well written book.