Body to body Amsterdam after midnight: the small hours, booked by name

The small hours bring a different kind of message. Between midnight and two, most requests come from guests returning from dinner, a show or a long evening with colleagues, who reach the room awake and not ready to sleep. From two to four, the thread hears from travellers whose body clocks run on another continent, from guests who have tried to sleep and given up, and from people back from the clubs. After four, requests are rare but never refused, and they usually come from someone with an early flight who would rather spend the last dark hours awake. Each of these guests gets the same rate and the same arrival window as a booking made at eight in the evening. The difference is the tone: after midnight, messages are shorter, the office answers briefly, and nobody expects small talk.

Not every woman works through the night, and the ones who do have chosen those hours. Cindy, Laura, Luna and Violetta are known for accepting late bookings willingly, and several others take bookings after midnight on the evenings they choose to work. Because availability after midnight is narrower than at nine in the evening, send two or three names rather than one, or give a preference and choose from the names the reply lists. The portrait wall shows everyone; the reply tells you who is actually free. Guests who stay several nights sometimes discover a favourite who suits the late hours and book her again the next night at the same time, which is the simplest way to be sure of the name you want.

After midnight, getting in is the part that can go wrong, so give it a sentence in your message. Many smaller hotels in the canal ring lock the front door at night and use a bell or a key card, and the night porter may be away from reception. If that applies to you, say that you will come down to open the door, and do so when she writes that she is two minutes away. Larger hotels stay open but often ask visitors to wait at reception; meeting her in the lobby and walking up together avoids that pause. For apartments, give the building number, which bell to press, and the floor, and warn her about steep canal-house stairs in the dark. A clear entrance is the difference between a knock on time and a woman standing in the cold.

At two in the morning a hotel corridor carries every sound. Old canal-house hotels in particular have wooden floors and doors that do little to hold noise in. Keep the television off or low, speak quietly when you open the door, and remember that the guest on the other side of the wall is probably asleep. In apartments, remember that neighbours in Amsterdam often sleep with a window open, even in cooler weather. None of this needs to change the session; it simply means the arrival and the goodbye should be done softly. If you are sharing a room or an apartment with friends, the note on friends in separate rooms explains how to arrange things without surprises for anyone.

Many after-midnight bookings follow a few drinks, and that is not a problem in itself. Drunkenness is. A body to body session involves close contact for the whole booking, and a woman may decline to begin, or end the booking, if a guest is clearly intoxicated or behaves unsafely; if the visit ends for that reason, the fee for the time reserved stays due. If you have had more than a couple of drinks, drink water while you wait, shower, and consider booking one hour rather than two. Guests back from a club who are not sure they can stay awake are often happier booking for the next afternoon instead. None of this is a lecture: the women who work after midnight simply work well with a guest who is present and relaxed, and so will you.

There is no night rate and no supplement after midnight. A guest on his own pays one hundred and eighty euros for one hour with one woman, two hundred and seventy for ninety minutes and three hundred and sixty for two hours. Two women with a single guest cost three hundred and sixty euros an hour, and a couple sharing one woman pays the same hourly figure on the couple line. If the small hours tempt you to keep her until morning, the eight-hour overnight with one woman is one thousand two hundred and fifty euros for a single guest and is confirmed with half sent ahead. A first booking with the house also carries a deposit of half, at any hour. The balance is paid in the room, in cash in any major currency, by card or in crypto, which is convenient when the nearest cash machine is a long walk away in the dark.

The pleasant part of a booking in the small hours is what follows it. Most guests fall asleep more easily after she leaves than they have all night. Help that along: leave the room warm, drink a glass of water, and put the phone out of reach rather than scrolling. If you have an early start, set two alarms before the session instead of afterwards. And if the booking was a way of filling the hours before a morning flight, the notes on last-minute bookings explain how to fit the evening around a tight schedule. Whatever the hour on the clock, the house books only guests who are twenty-one or over, and the confirmation in the chat is the same short message it is by day.