An hour costs €180 at three in the afternoon and €180 at three in the morning. This is a decision, not an oversight.
Nearly everything in a city charges more at night. Taxis tick over to the late tariff, room service adds the tray charge, the corner shop's prices drift upward after dark like everything is suddenly imported. So guests are reasonable to assume a 3am booking costs more than a 3pm one, and reasonably surprised when we tell them it doesn't. The hour is €180 around the clock — two hours €360, three €540, the overnight €1,250 — and the flat line is one of the most deliberate decisions in the practice.
The standard logic for a night surcharge goes: night work is exceptional, exceptions are expensive, pass it on. That logic fails at the first word here, because night work is not our exception. It is something close to half of everything we do. The hours between ten and three are our densest, and a practice whose busiest window carries a penalty tariff is a practice taxing its own customers for showing up at the right time.
The roster explains the rest. With forty-five therapists, the night shift is not a duty rotated onto the unlucky — it is staffed by women who prefer it, and there are more of them than outsiders would guess. The empty streets, the quieter bookings, the city at its most civilised: some of our most experienced practitioners work nights exclusively and would trade away the afternoon before they traded the dark. A surcharge usually exists to compensate reluctance. There is no reluctance to compensate.
There is also the matter of what a surcharge does to the guest's head at 1am, which is the part we care most about. The late-night booking decision is delicate — a person half-deciding, reading from a hotel bed, doing the quiet arithmetic of want versus reasonableness. Add a premium and you add a second voice to the arithmetic: am I being taken advantage of because it's late? That voice kills more bookings than the money itself. Remove it and the decision becomes what it should be: do I want this hour or not.
And flat pricing keeps us honest in the other direction too. Surge logic creates the temptation to nudge guests toward expensive hours. A flat tariff has no expensive hours to nudge toward — we are exactly as happy to see you at four in the afternoon as four in the morning, and the price list proves it in a way no reassurance could.
So: no after-hours premium, no weekend uplift, no small print that wakes up after midnight. The clock is the one thing in this city we refuse to charge for.