In the last decade, the concept of ecosystem goods and services has become a widely adopted assessment framework in research and practice. Recently, several authors have advocated spatially explicit service assessments at the landscape scale and promoted the concept of landscape services. As a result, the latter is increasingly being adopted by designers of landscape and spatial planning concepts. As the ecosystem service and the landscape service concepts are so closely related, I treat them as identical in my presentation. Despite being used widely, both concepts are criticized for not being able to deliver proper monetizing methods and for lacking knowledge transfer. In my presentation I provide a short overview of the current state of the debate and discuss deficits and pitfalls of the concepts. I conclude that certain points that meet with criticizm in the debates are indeed justly criticized and need improvement. The conceptual strengths of the two approaches however, e.g. the interdisciplinary character and the stringently systematic character of service assessment, are important components of up-front landscape and spatial planning efforts.