In Reply to: Tax & service charges, can anyone posted by micki on Monday, 8. December 2008 at 14:24 Bali Time:
this is common practice in US hotels, and is being seen more in the high end Australian and UK hotels. Places like Singapore and HK have been doing it for ever.
In the US there are laws that force the hotel to pass the service charge onto employees, thus (theoretically) taking the need to tip away, and/or making tipping fairer for employees who don't deal directly with guests but are just as important in getting them served (e.g. cooks, laundry, etc). If the service isn't passed onto the employee then the hotel must declare how much they are pocketing.
Unfortunately there is no such regulation in Bali or a number of other places, and so the service charge is nothing much more than a way for a hotel to make their prices look better than they are. I bet most of it, if not all, is kept by the hotel.
The tax is a GST type tax that is payable by all establishments and is often added onto the rate rather than be included.