I have a rule for London that has never once let me down, and it has nothing to do with stars, reviews or recommendations. If a business publishes its prices plainly, it is usually the better business. If it wants you to enquire, it usually is not.
This sounds too simple to be useful. Try it for a week and see how often it fails.
Where it shows up first
Restaurants are the obvious case. A menu in the window with prices on it is a restaurant that has decided what it is. “Market price” on anything other than genuine daily catch is a decision to charge what the table looks like it can pay.
Builders and tradespeople are the same. A fixed quote in writing means somebody has measured the job. A day rate with an open end means the job will take exactly as many days as it needs to take, which is a different thing.
Private hire learned this the hard way. The apps won not because they were cheaper, but because the number appears before the journey rather than after it. That single change reorganised an entire industry in about five years.
Gyms, dentists, garages, storage units, wedding venues: in every one of those trades, the London operator who publishes a price list is signalling that they do not need to read you before deciding what to charge.
Why vagueness is a strategy rather than an oversight
It is tempting to assume that businesses without published prices are just disorganised. Some are. Most are not.
Holding the price back does two things for a seller, and both of them are textbook information asymmetry. It lets them adjust to the customer, which is the polite version of charging more to people who look like they can afford it. And it gets you into a conversation, where the cost of walking away has already gone up because you have spent twenty minutes of your evening on it.
Both of those are working against you, and both disappear the moment a number is on a page.
It holds at the personal end too
The same test applies well beyond restaurants and garages, including the parts of London’s service economy that people are coy about.
Anything arranged for an evening, whether that is a driver, a guide, a private chef or company for dinner, runs on the same logic. Operators who state duration and cost up front tend to be the ones who also turn up on time and do what was agreed, because publishing a price is a commitment and commitments attract people who keep them. Somewhere that sets out what Indian escorts in London charge before you call has told you what kind of operation it is, and so has the one that insists you enquire first.
That is not a moral point. It is a practical one about who is easier to plan an evening around.
The honest counter-argument
There are real exceptions and it is worth being fair about them.
Genuinely bespoke work cannot be priced in advance, because the job is not known yet. A good architect or a structural engineer will not quote a number until they have seen the building, and that is correct rather than evasive.
The test for those cases is whether they will tell you their rate, which is different from the total. “I charge this much an hour and I expect it to take between four and six” is transparent. “Let us discuss it” is not.
How to use this in practice
Check prices before you check reviews. Reviews can be bought in bulk and increasingly are. A published price list is harder to fake because it binds the person who published it. The same goes for listings that show who has actually been checked: a directory of verified London escorts with rates on each entry is making a claim it can be held to, which is more than most review counts manage.
Ask for the number early in the conversation rather than late. The response tells you more than the number does.
Treat “it depends” as a request for more information, and give it. If the answer is still “it depends” after you have described exactly what you want, you have your answer about the business.
Walk away from anything that will only quote after a site visit, a phone call and a follow-up. In London that sequence is designed to make leaving feel rude.
The short version
Transparency is a proxy for competence, and in this city, it is the most reliable one available. Prefer anyone who tells you the price before you ask. They are easier to deal with, they are usually better, and they have already told you the most useful thing about themselves.