8 ms·

UK hotels adding service charge to room rate

57 points by edward 5y ago

adoxyz 5y ago
Optional service charge added by default. What a bizzaro world we live in.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." - Inigo Montoya I mean, maybe if I had the option of not paying it, but somehow I suspect I don't...
  - vimda 5y ago
    You do. You can ask for it to be removed. You just have to deal with the staff judging you, and a mandatory interrogation from a manager about why.
    - travisparker 5y ago
      I will be more than happy to explain to the manager's face why I do not appreciate being scammed.
    - dspillett 5y ago
      > You can ask for it to be removed. I will. And I will make sure I remember to add not only that charge, but extra faf in getting it removed, if I ever need to compare the price of that establishment with another in the future. Assuming I don't find out about the extra charge ahead of time of course. I once chose between two endurance running events a week apart (i.e. not enough recovery time between to be able to safely do both) on the basis that the one I nearly picked tried to charge a “payment processing fee” at the last checkout stage that wasn't quoted anywhere else. I checked the other event, no hidden fee, they got my business. The only problem with this comes when everyone is doing it, when it becomes a race to the bottom like the budget airlines which I don't generally even consider dealing with these days. > You just have to deal with the staff judging you, I doubt the staff will judge me. They are not stupid, they know the business is trying to con me into thinking something is cheaper than it is. They know what it is like to be on the receiving end of a con. The business (i.e. its management) may judge me. Fair's fair: I'll be judging them too as soon as I notice the attempted hidden charge. > and a mandatory interrogation from a manager about why. If it feels anything like an interrogation, said management will feel less comfortable than I. Of course, if they ask politely they'll have the situation explained politely. And in any case the time taken will be added to that “faf” consideration when deciding if I ever do business with the firm again.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
jonpurdy 5y ago
One of the things I loved about living in Asia (and traveling to Europe) was all-in prices posted everywhere. Made it so much simpler to add up, and was great paying cash due to the even numbers and lack of change. After moving back to Toronto (and now living in SF), my biggest beef at cafes and restaurants is with the Stripe/Square terminals that force the customer to decide whether to tip or not, requiring the user to interact with the screen. Just let me tap my phone/card and be done with it. Raise prices 20% or do whatever you have to do so workers can be paid fairly. Don't make the purchasing UX worse by introducing decision fatigue or guilt.
- sasaf5 5y ago
  Yes, I can't understand how making things unpleasant for the costumer will work in the long term.
  - zwieback 5y ago
    When I grew up in Germany you had to tell your server to their face when they brought the bill how much you want to tip them. Granted, base price includes reasonable service so tips are smaller but still always seemed unpleasant to me. Now, living in the US I got used to putting the tip on credit card bill or leaving as cash (rarely any more), which is a bit better since I have more control over the tip amount although I wish servers got better base pay and tips were smaller. The Square terminal approach actually seems pretty good to me, I feel totally fine leaving a smaller or no tip for counter service or larger for Covid times, etc. Once you get used to the UI it takes 5s to enter custom tip.
- jandrewrogers 5y ago
  It isn't that simple, this has been tried many times at restaurants in my city. Raising prices 20% and eliminating tipping reduces employee income even though it is nominally revenue neutral because it changes customer spending behavior. Employees don't get paid a 20% service charge for money customers don't spend. The assumption that the customer is not influenced by the structure of the transaction if the final bill would be the same does not hold up empirically. This is not an intuitive outcome, I don't think either restauranteurs or employees expected it when it was first tried, but the result was replicated many times. Since the market for good employees is competitive, restaurants that replace tipping with a 20% service charge have more difficulty finding and retaining employees. Most of the restaurants that tried this here eventually abandoned it because employees were quite reasonably unhappy about the reduced income. It is a fascinating example of the structural complexity of even relatively simple economic transactions.
ohazi 5y ago
For the moment, let's ignore the discussion about opt-out vs. opt-in... If the fee is truly discretionary, then you should be able to go to the front desk and ask them to remove the charge, and they should do so without a fuss. Has anyone tried this? My suspicion is that you either can't actually do this, or that the staff have been instructed to make this difficult. In that case, it would obvious that the fee isn't actually optional, and the regulators should be having a field day.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > My suspicion is that you either can't actually do this, or that the staff have been instructed to make this difficult. No I imagine they're extremely polite when you try to remove it - that way that get the charge from most people, and the few who actually care about 5% this way or that way will remove it and if you're polite to them you can try to avoid angering them while still getting it from the people who don't care.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    If they're smart, you're probably right. That would almost certainly be the best strategy. The question is, are they smart?
- nmstoker 5y ago
  I've done it occasionally in UK restaurants where the service clearly did not meet the level expected for the overall charge. It's certainly not a regular occurrence but equally it doesn't keep me up at night (it's optional, we don't have a warped view of tipping here and I wouldn't dream of withholding it unless the experience was undeniably poor)
uberman 5y ago
I would actually rather pay an optional fee like this baked into my bill than have to leave 5 to 20 bucks cash a day on the night stand for maid service. I hate the USA tipping culture that allow businesses to get thier clients to directly pay their staff. In NYC my wife once made me pay the guy "helping me out of my taxi" $20 bucks
- eptcyka 5y ago
  Hey, tips are tax-free. I think this is mostly the reason why businesses encourage tipping. I think it's a collective failure of the electorate and the government that you end up in such a situation.
  - larkost 5y ago
    Where do you get this idea? In the US there is a line on the income tax form that explicitly asks for how much you earned in tips, and that is explicitly counted into your wages for income tax purposes.
    - lampington 5y ago
      How much tipping these days is cash vs card? I would imagine that cash tips are underreported on tax forms.
      - hirsin 5y ago
        Credit tips are cashed out at the end of the day, generally speaking, so that the "credit tips" are offset by unreported "food cash payment" that sits in your pocket all night. (I believe it also relies on the business underreporting sales, but... Cash. Also likely hiring the wait staff under the table)
    - bombcar 5y ago
      Tips are effectively tax free as reporting rates are abysmal.
    - 5y ago
mikhailt 5y ago
> One US hotel CEO has publicly said that he wants guests to start tipping on room rates because otherwise he will have to increase wages. Of course he does, tipping cost them nothing. Tipping is not supposed to be the norm nor is it supposed to cover people's living wages. I would be happy to tip for people that go above the line of duty but I shouldn't be tipping every worker for doing their job nor should I be guilt-tripped into doing it, especially since I need the money as well.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Should I also go and personally give the CEO dollar? I mean that would allow company to lower his wage. I wonder if CEO would be up to this...
  - Fogest 5y ago
    Don't the shareholders already kinda "tip" the CEO's in a way? A lot of the time they get performance based bonuses or extra incentives from shareholders. Except they want to get bigger "tips" from shareholders by exploiting their workers and not paying them fairly so that they get better performance.
    - jareklupinski 5y ago
      let's rename "tip" to "bonus" and really watch worlds collide :)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- elliekelly 5y ago
  I wonder how tips factor in to CPI and/or cost of living indices? If the average hotel is $100/night but most people start to tip (in order to pay hotel staff a living wage) would a one night stay go into the basket as $100 or $120?
Someone1234 5y ago
The problem with allowing stuff like this is that it creates an arms race: If one company can reduce their room rate 5% and shift it to a hidden "charge" then all their competitors MUST do the same to remain competitive. The net result is that nobody is making more than they were before, but customers feel mislead. So while there a prevailing "regulation is bad" attitude about stuff like this, it really does benefit both the customer AND business if all pricing is listed equivalently up-front. Which is to say: I hope the UK bans this too, and room-rates are again flat (with or without VAT).
- hamandcheese 5y ago
  Or they can stay competitive by normalizing (and very clearly advertising) “all in, no additional fees”. I would certainly notice this, at least.
- foobarian 5y ago
  It's pretty infuriating that this is a thing. Even if you think you might be able to get your users to notice if you went against this grain, you are still asking the product leaders to give up a significant chunk of revenue for a probably very long time. It would take major commitment from the top to pull this off and would not work as some quarterly site improvement project by a rank and file engineer or product manager.
- hakfoo 5y ago
  We had his happen with airline tickets... everything got unbundled so as to show the lowest price on Travelocity or whoever. I never understood why there was no backlash at the aggregators for disguising the true price of the product (or offering "comparison" of noncomparable products. A service that accurately shows comparable, out the door prices is more useful than the one that says "$30 cheaper" only to find out after the fact there's $50 in missing services or hidden costs buried in it. I wonder if there's anyone that accurately does it now: a flight search that lets you say "show me lowest fare inclusive of a checked bag an inflight meal" or "hotel prices including the various undisclosed fees and taxes."
  - 5y ago
rjh29 5y ago
UK hotels are already 50% more expensive than normal due to the post-covid domestic travel boom, on top of being more expensive than most other European countries to begin with. I won't use them unless I absolutely have to.
- Cullinet 5y ago
  and staff shortages supposedly Brexit induced. in 2019 I met a young eastern European hotel worker who proudly showed me his British passport while telling me how he'd merely recorded six years of entry and exit documents for obtaining nationality despite having spent almost all his adult life in his home country in prison. I discovered this is tip of the iceberg for the failure of visa application and immigration systems in the UK, and I am thinking that post covid rehiring processes of laid off and furloughed staff is exposing significant numbers of unemployables. edit : because obtaining furlough funds and other assistance is only possible in relation to individuals who have recourse to public funds and new UK nationals don't have automatic recourse to public funds and this will trigger a new hiring process and background check, as I understand it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - sofixa 5y ago
    I find that hard to believe. In France, you need to show tax returns, a diploma, a work certificate from your employer, etc. to prove you've been in the country and contributing to it somehow. Either the UK bureaucracy is that much worse than the French one, or something smells.
  - mmarq 5y ago
    You can apply for naturalisation one year after you are granted indefinite leave to remain. If they had a passport in 2019, this person must have applied for ILR before the EU Settlement Scheme, which started in 2019. So in order to prove they lived in the UK, they must have sent kilograms of payslips (2-3 per year), reference letters, various proofs of address (2-3 per year) and a list of all travels abroad (to prove you haven’t been outside of the UK for more that 6 months), which you can’t do if you are in prison abroad. It took me 2-3 weeks to collect all the documentation, and I never changed address and I only worked for blue chip companies. My partner could not apply for ILR before the settlement scheme because half the companies she worked for went out of business and couldn’t provide reference letters. He may have been very lucky with his case worker, but this is definitely not the “tip of the iceberg” of anything. You don’t need to be a British citizen to claim benefits or furlough money or public funds. An ILR or having worked for X months should suffice (assuming you can live in the UK on 150£ per week).
noahmbarr 5y ago
Law should be adjusted to say: any “defaulted on” fees should be rolled in. Huge proponent of “the price you see is the price you pay”.
jb_s 5y ago
OT, but does anyone know how Yahoo managed to auto-play videos in Chrome without user interaction? I thought this had been blocked since years ago.
cheradenine_uk 5y ago
Why would anyone pay this? What next, a "cutlery" charge at a restaurant?
- scriptease 5y ago
  A cutlery charge exists in Italy
bsd44 5y ago
I understood from the article that only some high-end hotels are doing this. I mean as long as it's optional why pay it? Even if I could afford to spend £500/night for a hotel, why pay some additional optional charge? If they can charge me that much money for a room, they can afford to pay their staff.
foxyv 5y ago
I think something that should be blatantly illegal is hidden fees. When I go to buy a car or rent a room and I end up paying 20-80% more because there are a bunch of hidden fees that is just too much. I could understand offering addons, but stuff that is required as part of the sale is just plain unethical. It's bald faced false advertising.
Fnoord 5y ago
The Mafia and other crooks must love the tipping culture (which seemed to be true according to what I heard in E392/E393 of Jordan Harbinger Show [1]) as it allows them both special treatment, easy way of using black money, and a way to avoid taxes. Wouldn't surprise me if they're deep proponents of it. Its also a race to the bottom: how much BS can I get away with squeezing the customer. "They do it, too" is just an equivalent of "they are getting away with it, too". You get this kind of crap when there's no regulations or when they are not actively enforced. [1] https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-jordan-harbinger-show/episode/393-joaquin-jack-garcia-undercover-in-the-mafia-part-two-77086445 https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-jordan-harbinger-show/epis...

57 points by edward 5y ago

adoxyz 5y ago

Optional service charge added by default. What a bizzaro world we live in.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." - Inigo Montoya I mean, maybe if I had the option of not paying it, but somehow I suspect I don't...
- vimda 5y ago
  You do. You can ask for it to be removed. You just have to deal with the staff judging you, and a mandatory interrogation from a manager about why.
  - travisparker 5y ago
    I will be more than happy to explain to the manager's face why I do not appreciate being scammed.
  - dspillett 5y ago
    > You can ask for it to be removed. I will. And I will make sure I remember to add not only that charge, but extra faf in getting it removed, if I ever need to compare the price of that establishment with another in the future. Assuming I don't find out about the extra charge ahead of time of course. I once chose between two endurance running events a week apart (i.e. not enough recovery time between to be able to safely do both) on the basis that the one I nearly picked tried to charge a “payment processing fee” at the last checkout stage that wasn't quoted anywhere else. I checked the other event, no hidden fee, they got my business. The only problem with this comes when everyone is doing it, when it becomes a race to the bottom like the budget airlines which I don't generally even consider dealing with these days. > You just have to deal with the staff judging you, I doubt the staff will judge me. They are not stupid, they know the business is trying to con me into thinking something is cheaper than it is. They know what it is like to be on the receiving end of a con. The business (i.e. its management) may judge me. Fair's fair: I'll be judging them too as soon as I notice the attempted hidden charge. > and a mandatory interrogation from a manager about why. If it feels anything like an interrogation, said management will feel less comfortable than I. Of course, if they ask politely they'll have the situation explained politely. And in any case the time taken will be added to that “faf” consideration when deciding if I ever do business with the firm again.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

jonpurdy 5y ago

One of the things I loved about living in Asia (and traveling to Europe) was all-in prices posted everywhere. Made it so much simpler to add up, and was great paying cash due to the even numbers and lack of change. After moving back to Toronto (and now living in SF), my biggest beef at cafes and restaurants is with the Stripe/Square terminals that force the customer to decide whether to tip or not, requiring the user to interact with the screen. Just let me tap my phone/card and be done with it. Raise prices 20% or do whatever you have to do so workers can be paid fairly. Don't make the purchasing UX worse by introducing decision fatigue or guilt.

sasaf5 5y ago
Yes, I can't understand how making things unpleasant for the costumer will work in the long term.
- zwieback 5y ago
  When I grew up in Germany you had to tell your server to their face when they brought the bill how much you want to tip them. Granted, base price includes reasonable service so tips are smaller but still always seemed unpleasant to me. Now, living in the US I got used to putting the tip on credit card bill or leaving as cash (rarely any more), which is a bit better since I have more control over the tip amount although I wish servers got better base pay and tips were smaller. The Square terminal approach actually seems pretty good to me, I feel totally fine leaving a smaller or no tip for counter service or larger for Covid times, etc. Once you get used to the UI it takes 5s to enter custom tip.
jandrewrogers 5y ago
It isn't that simple, this has been tried many times at restaurants in my city. Raising prices 20% and eliminating tipping reduces employee income even though it is nominally revenue neutral because it changes customer spending behavior. Employees don't get paid a 20% service charge for money customers don't spend. The assumption that the customer is not influenced by the structure of the transaction if the final bill would be the same does not hold up empirically. This is not an intuitive outcome, I don't think either restauranteurs or employees expected it when it was first tried, but the result was replicated many times. Since the market for good employees is competitive, restaurants that replace tipping with a 20% service charge have more difficulty finding and retaining employees. Most of the restaurants that tried this here eventually abandoned it because employees were quite reasonably unhappy about the reduced income. It is a fascinating example of the structural complexity of even relatively simple economic transactions.

ohazi 5y ago

For the moment, let's ignore the discussion about opt-out vs. opt-in... If the fee is truly discretionary, then you should be able to go to the front desk and ask them to remove the charge, and they should do so without a fuss. Has anyone tried this? My suspicion is that you either can't actually do this, or that the staff have been instructed to make this difficult. In that case, it would obvious that the fee isn't actually optional, and the regulators should be having a field day.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
chrisseaton 5y ago
> My suspicion is that you either can't actually do this, or that the staff have been instructed to make this difficult. No I imagine they're extremely polite when you try to remove it - that way that get the charge from most people, and the few who actually care about 5% this way or that way will remove it and if you're polite to them you can try to avoid angering them while still getting it from the people who don't care.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  If they're smart, you're probably right. That would almost certainly be the best strategy. The question is, are they smart?
nmstoker 5y ago
I've done it occasionally in UK restaurants where the service clearly did not meet the level expected for the overall charge. It's certainly not a regular occurrence but equally it doesn't keep me up at night (it's optional, we don't have a warped view of tipping here and I wouldn't dream of withholding it unless the experience was undeniably poor)

uberman 5y ago

I would actually rather pay an optional fee like this baked into my bill than have to leave 5 to 20 bucks cash a day on the night stand for maid service. I hate the USA tipping culture that allow businesses to get thier clients to directly pay their staff. In NYC my wife once made me pay the guy "helping me out of my taxi" $20 bucks

eptcyka 5y ago
Hey, tips are tax-free. I think this is mostly the reason why businesses encourage tipping. I think it's a collective failure of the electorate and the government that you end up in such a situation.
- larkost 5y ago
  Where do you get this idea? In the US there is a line on the income tax form that explicitly asks for how much you earned in tips, and that is explicitly counted into your wages for income tax purposes.
  - lampington 5y ago
    How much tipping these days is cash vs card? I would imagine that cash tips are underreported on tax forms.
    - hirsin 5y ago
      Credit tips are cashed out at the end of the day, generally speaking, so that the "credit tips" are offset by unreported "food cash payment" that sits in your pocket all night. (I believe it also relies on the business underreporting sales, but... Cash. Also likely hiring the wait staff under the table)
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Tips are effectively tax free as reporting rates are abysmal.
  - 5y ago

mikhailt 5y ago

> One US hotel CEO has publicly said that he wants guests to start tipping on room rates because otherwise he will have to increase wages. Of course he does, tipping cost them nothing. Tipping is not supposed to be the norm nor is it supposed to cover people's living wages. I would be happy to tip for people that go above the line of duty but I shouldn't be tipping every worker for doing their job nor should I be guilt-tripped into doing it, especially since I need the money as well.

Ekaros 5y ago
Should I also go and personally give the CEO dollar? I mean that would allow company to lower his wage. I wonder if CEO would be up to this...
- Fogest 5y ago
  Don't the shareholders already kinda "tip" the CEO's in a way? A lot of the time they get performance based bonuses or extra incentives from shareholders. Except they want to get bigger "tips" from shareholders by exploiting their workers and not paying them fairly so that they get better performance.
  - jareklupinski 5y ago
    let's rename "tip" to "bonus" and really watch worlds collide :)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
elliekelly 5y ago
I wonder how tips factor in to CPI and/or cost of living indices? If the average hotel is $100/night but most people start to tip (in order to pay hotel staff a living wage) would a one night stay go into the basket as $100 or $120?

Someone1234 5y ago

The problem with allowing stuff like this is that it creates an arms race: If one company can reduce their room rate 5% and shift it to a hidden "charge" then all their competitors MUST do the same to remain competitive. The net result is that nobody is making more than they were before, but customers feel mislead. So while there a prevailing "regulation is bad" attitude about stuff like this, it really does benefit both the customer AND business if all pricing is listed equivalently up-front. Which is to say: I hope the UK bans this too, and room-rates are again flat (with or without VAT).

hamandcheese 5y ago
Or they can stay competitive by normalizing (and very clearly advertising) “all in, no additional fees”. I would certainly notice this, at least.
foobarian 5y ago
It's pretty infuriating that this is a thing. Even if you think you might be able to get your users to notice if you went against this grain, you are still asking the product leaders to give up a significant chunk of revenue for a probably very long time. It would take major commitment from the top to pull this off and would not work as some quarterly site improvement project by a rank and file engineer or product manager.
hakfoo 5y ago
We had his happen with airline tickets... everything got unbundled so as to show the lowest price on Travelocity or whoever. I never understood why there was no backlash at the aggregators for disguising the true price of the product (or offering "comparison" of noncomparable products. A service that accurately shows comparable, out the door prices is more useful than the one that says "$30 cheaper" only to find out after the fact there's $50 in missing services or hidden costs buried in it. I wonder if there's anyone that accurately does it now: a flight search that lets you say "show me lowest fare inclusive of a checked bag an inflight meal" or "hotel prices including the various undisclosed fees and taxes."
- 5y ago

rjh29 5y ago

UK hotels are already 50% more expensive than normal due to the post-covid domestic travel boom, on top of being more expensive than most other European countries to begin with. I won't use them unless I absolutely have to.

Cullinet 5y ago
and staff shortages supposedly Brexit induced. in 2019 I met a young eastern European hotel worker who proudly showed me his British passport while telling me how he'd merely recorded six years of entry and exit documents for obtaining nationality despite having spent almost all his adult life in his home country in prison. I discovered this is tip of the iceberg for the failure of visa application and immigration systems in the UK, and I am thinking that post covid rehiring processes of laid off and furloughed staff is exposing significant numbers of unemployables. edit : because obtaining furlough funds and other assistance is only possible in relation to individuals who have recourse to public funds and new UK nationals don't have automatic recourse to public funds and this will trigger a new hiring process and background check, as I understand it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sofixa 5y ago
  I find that hard to believe. In France, you need to show tax returns, a diploma, a work certificate from your employer, etc. to prove you've been in the country and contributing to it somehow. Either the UK bureaucracy is that much worse than the French one, or something smells.
- mmarq 5y ago
  You can apply for naturalisation one year after you are granted indefinite leave to remain. If they had a passport in 2019, this person must have applied for ILR before the EU Settlement Scheme, which started in 2019. So in order to prove they lived in the UK, they must have sent kilograms of payslips (2-3 per year), reference letters, various proofs of address (2-3 per year) and a list of all travels abroad (to prove you haven’t been outside of the UK for more that 6 months), which you can’t do if you are in prison abroad. It took me 2-3 weeks to collect all the documentation, and I never changed address and I only worked for blue chip companies. My partner could not apply for ILR before the settlement scheme because half the companies she worked for went out of business and couldn’t provide reference letters. He may have been very lucky with his case worker, but this is definitely not the “tip of the iceberg” of anything. You don’t need to be a British citizen to claim benefits or furlough money or public funds. An ILR or having worked for X months should suffice (assuming you can live in the UK on 150£ per week).

noahmbarr 5y ago

Law should be adjusted to say: any “defaulted on” fees should be rolled in. Huge proponent of “the price you see is the price you pay”.

jb_s 5y ago

OT, but does anyone know how Yahoo managed to auto-play videos in Chrome without user interaction? I thought this had been blocked since years ago.

cheradenine_uk 5y ago

Why would anyone pay this? What next, a "cutlery" charge at a restaurant?

scriptease 5y ago
A cutlery charge exists in Italy

bsd44 5y ago

I understood from the article that only some high-end hotels are doing this. I mean as long as it's optional why pay it? Even if I could afford to spend £500/night for a hotel, why pay some additional optional charge? If they can charge me that much money for a room, they can afford to pay their staff.

foxyv 5y ago

I think something that should be blatantly illegal is hidden fees. When I go to buy a car or rent a room and I end up paying 20-80% more because there are a bunch of hidden fees that is just too much. I could understand offering addons, but stuff that is required as part of the sale is just plain unethical. It's bald faced false advertising.

Fnoord 5y ago

The Mafia and other crooks must love the tipping culture (which seemed to be true according to what I heard in E392/E393 of Jordan Harbinger Show [1]) as it allows them both special treatment, easy way of using black money, and a way to avoid taxes. Wouldn't surprise me if they're deep proponents of it. Its also a race to the bottom: how much BS can I get away with squeezing the customer. "They do it, too" is just an equivalent of "they are getting away with it, too". You get this kind of crap when there's no regulations or when they are not actively enforced. [1] https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-jordan-harbinger-show/episode/393-joaquin-jack-garcia-undercover-in-the-mafia-part-two-77086445 https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-jordan-harbinger-show/epis...