Half of the rate card confirms a reservation from this wall, a first reservation included, and cancelling does not bring it back. Just one booking waits for the room: an hour or two, for today, from a guest the office already knows.
Reserve from the roster four times over and the same sum appears in four sizes. Karolina, Polish, is asked for three hours next Friday: EUR 540 on the rate card, EUR 270 cleared when the office accepts, EUR 270 handed to her at the door. Milena, Serbian, and Nora, Danish, are booked as a pair for two hours on Saturday: EUR 720, of which EUR 360 goes ahead and EUR 360 waits in the room. Violetta, Ukrainian, is reserved for the eight-hour night at EUR 1,250, so EUR 625 confirms the night and EUR 625 is settled when she arrives. And a guest who has never written to the house asks for Luna, Spanish, for one hour this evening: EUR 180, with EUR 90 sent before she leaves De Pijp and EUR 90 paid to her on arrival.
Four frames, one arithmetic. A deposit here is half of the figure printed on the rate card: exactly half, not a range, and not a figure that softens if you ask. The confirmation on the WhatsApp thread, or on Telegram, states it in writing at the moment the booking is accepted, and the woman you chose does not set out until it has cleared. Nothing inside the ring is added for the small hours or the weekend, so half of the card is the entire deposit; a session that runs past three hours adds EUR 180 for each further hour, and the deposit is half of the whole. The remaining half is the balance, paid in the room as cash in any major currency at that day's rate, by card, or in crypto.
The deposit attaches to eight kinds of reservation, and the catalogue lists them in full:
Lucie, Belgian, is asked for ninety minutes at a canal-ring hotel this afternoon by a guest whose earlier evenings with the house went as arranged. Nothing is sent ahead. The office confirms in roughly ten minutes, she reaches the door in forty to sixty, and EUR 270 is paid to her there, in one sum, in cash, on a card or in crypto. It is the one reservation this house settles entirely on arrival: a same-day session of one hour or two, with a single woman, for a guest already known to the office. It is the exception and should be read as one; the deposit is what a reservation ordinarily looks like here. Ask the same Lucie for three hours, or for tomorrow, or add Danielle, French, to make a pair, and the half comes back. A guest writing for the first time is outside the exception altogether, however short the hour, and the reason is simple: the office knows nothing of you yet.
Card, Revolut, Wise, cryptocurrency. They settle electronically before anyone has left home, and they are the only four the office takes. A bank transfer is not among them, and nor is PayPal. Cash is not a deposit either, for the plainest reason: the deposit has to sit with the office before she leaves her flat, and cash cannot be anywhere until she is. Cash belongs to the balance, together with card and crypto.
The details for sending it come in one place and at one moment: inside the WhatsApp thread the office has already confirmed, after acceptance, from the office and from nobody else. A request for a deposit that lands before the office has said yes, or from a number other than the booking line, did not come from this house. The booking page shows the order the messages take.
A deposit is not returned when the guest cancels. Not with a week's notice, not with a month's, not in part for early warning; the house keeps no refund ladder because there is no point on the calendar at which cancelling becomes free. The cost of a reservation begins the second the office says yes, and a message sent later cannot reach back to that second.
Consider what has happened between the office saying yes to Violetta's night and the message that cancels it. Someone has confirmed her, taken the address, fixed the timing. Her whole night has been closed to every other guest, and the requests that came in for it have been sent elsewhere. Her journey there and back has been arranged. If the reservation were a pair, two calendars closed at once; if it were at the airport, the travel was fixed days before. All of it was done because the reservation was accepted, and cancelling leaves it done. The deposit is the measure of that work. It was never priced as a penalty, and it does not become one when plans change.
Two circumstances are read differently, and only two. A government ban on operating, or a sickness grave enough that the session cannot go ahead, may be accepted as force majeure. The office decides each case on its own facts. Where it accepts one, the half already placed turns into credit against a later reservation; it does not turn into cash, by any route. A clash in the diary, a dinner that ran late, a head cold, an airline that moved the flight, a change of heart: these are cancellations, plainly, and the half stays put.
Now and then a reservation goes ahead with nothing in front of it: Lucie's afternoon above, or a late request accepted while Molly, Irish, was already in a taxi from Centrum. Being trusted defers the payment; it does not shrink it. If such a reservation is cancelled, the taxi she took, the hours she shut and the guests she turned away are no less real, and the office asks afterwards for cancellation collateral equal to the deposit the reservation would have carried. One rule; the only thing that moves is the day it is collected.
A session the guest ends early is charged at the length that was reserved, and no part of it is returned. The hour was held for you, she made the journey for it, and the minutes you leave cannot be offered to anyone else that day. She, for her part, may end a session at once and without refund the moment her safety or her consent is in doubt. That is written here once, calmly, and it covers every frame on the wall.
A reservation under a made-up name, on somebody else's number or profile, sent for a laugh, or left unanswered by someone who never planned to be behind the door: the house does not file any of these as a cancellation. It files them as false bookings, and the file is kept. The identifiers used are shared with the other reputable houses in Amsterdam, so their women know the name, and the matter is referred to the relevant authorities where that is warranted.
None of it reaches a guest who gives a real name and answers the knock. The fifteen women on this wall, and the forty-five the house sends out across the city, walk into unfamiliar hotels alone and often after midnight, trusting a handful of typed lines. The record exists for them.
Start from the end and work toward the statute. A cancellation with this house is governed by the policy on this page and by the house terms. It is governed by them because no fourteen-day withdrawal right arises for the reservation. No such right arises because Article 6:230p of the Civil Code lifts out of the withdrawal right every service the provider must carry out on a particular day or inside a particular span of time, and a reservation here is always for a named woman, a fixed hour and a fixed date, or one fixed night. That article sits in the same body of law as the right itself: Dutch distance-selling law, the Wet Koop op Afstand, which implements the EU Consumer Rights Directive. And under that law a consumer buying a service at a distance would ordinarily have fourteen days in which to withdraw. Read forwards, the chain is short: the ordinary right exists, the article carves dated services out of it in the date-specific-service exemption, a booked hour is a dated service, and so for a booked hour there is nothing to withdraw from. The guest does not give the right up at confirmation; for an hour with a date on it, the right never came into existence.
General questions live in the FAQ; anything touching your own reservation goes to the booking line.