All this talk is just mostly semantics and shifting things around. Let me tell you how.
Lets take a hotel that gives a complimentary free breakfast.
First, "free" there does not refer to free as in beer, nor free as in liberty.
Why not? Because the breakfast is not free to someone who hasn't paid for the hotel room(similar to how OS X is not free to install on VMs and PCs), and the cost for the beer comes directly out of the pool of the prices paid for the room by users.
So now, lets take two hotels, Hotel O and Hotel A.
Hotel O outsources their breakfast to a catering company M. A pays M for making breakfast. M hires chefs, buys food from the market etc.
Hotel A makes the breakfast in it's own kitchen, hiring chefs, buying ingredients etc on it's own.
Now , customers CO (staying at hotel O) and CA(staying at hotel A) do not like hotel breakfasts because they suck and they have free breakfast at the conference they're attending anyway. So they want a refund from their hotels.
So, your argument for Hotel O being forced to refund the breakfast cost and Hotel A not being forced legally is that "it's kinda difficult to calculate A's costs because you have to add this and that and subtract that and this, while it's easy to calculate O's costs. Hence O should refund the money to CO but CA is screwed?!
Can you explain why CA has less consumer rights just because A happens to make breakfast inhouse instead of outsourcing it like O?
What difference does it make to CA and how does this make any sense?