Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast Friday the 11th of August, the last one of the week, and a few words of, I hope, good-humoured warning about unexpected items in the billing area.

This is a subject I've touched on before, but it's got a new impetus.

We've been reporting in The Independent this week about how a traveller tourist in the beautiful Lake Como region of northern Italy was charged two euros extra for a divisor

that's a cutting in half charge for his toasted sandwich he was a bit miffed by this because

how can you possibly justify charging almost a couple of pounds for just splitting

a toasted sandwich in half so that he and his companion could eat it? Well, the proprietor said,

oh, this is perfectly legitimate. We can make this charge because it's going to involve a bit

of extra work for us, a bit more washing up and so on.

And actually, if you look into this specific example, I have a bit of sympathy with the proprietor,

although it should certainly be up front that you can have this sandwich, of course you can,

but it's going to cost you extra.

The sympathy I have is that these days, if I go into a pub and there's two of us and we want a half a pint of beer each,

that is going to generally cost more than the cost of a single pint of beer.

That's just the way things are.

And in America, there is a split plate charge,

and that is typically $5, $4 or so.

And on top of that, of course, you've got to add the tax and the tip,

so that's going to end up as basically a fiver and there are sort of limits

so that quite often for instance in family meal settings somebody will order a dessert and other

people will have a spoon i wouldn't expect that to be offered without any, I wouldn't expect a charge

for that. But it's really good that this has come to light because it does make people, I hope,

pay a bit more attention about what the possible practices are. And in Italy, certainly you need to assume that there is a cover charge, a

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