Journal · Amsterdam · 2026-08-07
A Comma That Came Back as a Point
A guest read the overnight rate on their phone and saw a figure that looked like small change. The digits were right. The mark between them had changed.
The question came in politely, and a little confused. The guest had been reading the rates on their phone. They wanted to know if the overnight was really so cheap, or if they had misunderstood. On their screen, the figure had a point after its first digit, with three more digits behind it.
Where they came from, a point in a number is a decimal mark. So the figure read as a single unit and a fraction. Eight hours for the price of a sandwich made no sense, and they knew it. But they did not know what the real figure was.
What had happened
On the profile they had opened, the overnight figure is written with a comma after its first digit. The comma separates the thousands, so the real figure was a thousand times larger than the one on their screen. The guest had copied the figure into a note on their phone to compare prices, and the phone had written it back in the style of its own language. In that style, the thousands mark is a point. So the comma became a point.
The four digits were the same, in the same order. Only the mark had changed. And that mark, in the guest's own habit of reading, turned a thousand into a one.
Why nobody noticed at first
Most of the time, context saves us. A coffee costs a few euros, and nobody reads it as a few thousand. But for something new, where you do not yet have a sense of the price, context is missing. That is when a mark between digits can mislead you, in either direction.
The reverse happens too. A guest who sees a comma followed by only two digits in a Dutch shop may think a digit is missing. It is not. In the Netherlands, those two digits are cents, and the item is something small.
How the question was answered
The reply wrote the figure out in full words, for eight hours, for one guest with one therapist. Then it spelled out the half as well, because the overnight always has a deposit: one half before she travels, the matching half at the door.
Words remove both marks. A number spelled out in letters cannot shrink by a thousand. For a figure you are unsure of, writing it in words is the surest way to agree.
Three habits on this site
Every rate on this site follows the same three habits. The comma is only used for thousands. No rate has cents. And figures under a thousand have no mark at all, just three plain digits. So if you ever see a rate with a point in it, it did not come from here in that form. Your phone, an app or a copy and paste has changed it.
A simple check follows from this. Count the digits after the mark. Three digits means thousands. One or two digits would mean cents, and a rate here never has cents.
The halves
The deposit is where this matters most, because it is a sum you work out, or check, in your head. The overnight splits into two equal halves, and so does every larger block, with two guests or with two therapists. If you read any of these with the marks swapped, the halves stop making sense, which is a useful signal in itself. When a half looks wrong, the marks are the first thing to check.
Figures in the reply
A reply here always writes the price and the deposit as whole euros, with the comma only for thousands. You may see EUR before the number or the word euros after it. They mean the same thing. If you read the reply through a translation app, the app may rewrite the figures in the style of your language, and a comma can turn into a point on the way. So read the figure in the original English message first, then in the translation, and check that the digits are the same. If they are, the price is the same, whatever the mark between them.
What the guest did next
They booked the overnight a week later. Their first message included a line they had clearly thought about: the overnight figure copied in digits, then the same figure spelled out, then the word correct with a question mark. It was correct. The reply confirmed it in the same words.
That line is worth copying. It costs a few seconds and it closes the question before it can open. The guide to euro figures shows how to run the same check on any figure you meet.