Dutch café payment points pressure diners into excessive tipping, expert says

A terrace in Amsterdam. - Credit: - License: DepositPhotos Business Culture Lifestyle Friday, 9 October 2026 - 07:00

As a growing number of Dutch hospitality businesses continue offering a screen prompt asking customers to pay a 5, 15, or 20 percent tip, some visitors and experts continue to criticize it. The prompt is “cleverly designed” to make the highest tip feel like the normal choice, consumer psychologist Patrick Wessels told Hart van Nederland.

Being confronted with a question about a tip is an unusual experience, Wessels said, as normally people are not asked outright for one when they go to pay at a register. “You get a kind of confrontation. You have to make a choice,” Wessels told the news outlet.

The psychologist believes that every tip option has been thoroughly thought through. “They often start with the highest percentage, which our brain then takes as the reference point. You weigh the other options, but they often look much lower than that first 20 percent.” As a result, people more often choose the highest option, Wessels said.

“There is not much wrong with asking for [a tip] a bit more explicitly,” professor of consumer ethics Marijke Leliveld told NU.nl. “A tip screen is a nudge to encourage different behavior while another choice is still available. You are only changing the choice architecture.”

Not all the customers are happy with the change. The “no thanks” button is reportedly often not immediately visible and requires an extra tap or extra scrolling, while the 20 percent tip option can often appear in a larger font inside a colored box, according to NU.nl. These are examples of “dark patterns” Lotje Beek from Bits of Freedom told the news outlet.

“Through design, you are steered toward a choice you otherwise would not have made.” Some variants even fall under the Unfair Commercial Practice Directive for being excessively misleading. “There is nothing wrong with asking for a tip,” Beek said. “Still, you would want the choices presented as equal.”

The industry group Koninklijke Horeca Nederland said it is pleased with the tip screens. The group said that as more and more places only accept cards, people can sometimes forget to leave a tip. “Digital tip options can partly make up for that,” a spokesperson told NU.nl. “Most modern payment systems now offer this function as a standard, so the option is becoming more visible.”