Use of multiple “and” in a sentence

Question

I’m having trouble convincing a client that the following phrase is correct:

Price is per couple and subject to 10% service charge and applicable government tax.

My client doesn’t believe the sentence (or it appears, any sentence for that matter) should have the word “and” appear multiple times. His suggested edit is:

Price is per couple, subject to 10% service charge and applicable government tax.”

Would love it if you could help clear this up for us and shed some light on the best way to phrase this sentence (without splitting it into two).

Answer 1

I think your client is wrong.

This not a list of 3 things at the same level. If it were, the client's version would be reasonable.

The way you can tell that the second version is not right is that you can't pull the list items into their own sentences:

The price is per couple.
The price is subject to 10% service charge.
The price is applicable government tax.

As you can see from that, "subject to" applies to the last two items, so they need to be grouped together, but not in the same group as "per couple".

What we actually have are nested groupings:

The price is per couple and subject to (10% service charge and applicable government tax).

The outer group is a list of two features of the price, the nested group is a list of extra charges.