The Lobby, the Lift and the Door, in That Order

An outcall booking has one genuinely fragile stretch and it is shorter than people expect. Not the arranging, which is four facts in a message. Not the session, which belongs to the two people in the room. The fragile part is the ninety seconds between a street door and a corridor, and it is fragile because it involves a building neither of you designed.

The lobby

Some buildings in the centre have a desk with somebody behind it at all hours. Some have a desk that is unstaffed after eleven. Some have no lobby at all and open straight onto a stairwell that smells of bicycles.

None of these is a problem in itself. All three become a problem when nobody mentioned which one it is. Write a sentence in the thread, before the hour is fixed, saying what happens at the front of your building at the hour you have booked. Fifteen words is enough. A guest who does that has eliminated the commonest reason an arrival lands at sixty minutes rather than forty.

If your building has a staffed desk, there is nothing to manage and nothing to arrange. A person walking through a lobby with somewhere to be is the least remarkable sight in any hotel in this city. Nobody is hiding and nobody needs to.

The lift

This is where the actual obstacles live. Lifts in newer buildings frequently want a room card before they will accept a floor, and many of them want it only after a certain hour, which means a guest who arrived at four in the afternoon may not know the rule exists.

Find out. It takes one question at the desk when you check in, or one experiment on your way back up. Then put the answer in the thread. If the lift needs a card, the simplest arrangement is that you come down and go back up together, and that arrangement works perfectly well as long as it is agreed in advance rather than improvised from a lobby with a phone against your ear.

Stairs are worth a line too. Four flights with no lift is entirely manageable information and completely unmanageable surprise, particularly in weather this city produces without warning.

The door

Floor number and room number, written out in the thread, in digits. That sounds too obvious to be worth a paragraph and it is the single most frequently omitted fact in first messages.

Corridors in converted buildings do not always number in the direction you would expect. Two wings can share a floor with separate stairwells. An apartment building may put number 3 on what any reasonable person would call the second floor, because the ground floor is not counted. All of that is ordinary and none of it matters, provided the number is written down and provided you are behind the door it names.

The part that is yours alone

Be reachable. A phone face up and charged from the moment the hour is agreed until she knocks. Not in a coat in a wardrobe, not on silent, not charging in a bathroom.

This is the one failure that cannot be recovered from the other side. Everything else in this piece can be solved by a short conversation from the street. A phone nobody answers cannot, and the booking simply stops there, which is a poor way to spend an evening and a poorer way to spend a deposit.

A short template

If it helps, here is the whole of what the building paragraph needs to say. Street door locks after eleven, so message me and I will come down. Lift wants a room card after ten. Fourth floor, room 412, left out of the lift and to the end. Phone will be face up.

Forty words. They do more for an arrival than anything else a guest can write, and they turn the one fragile stretch of an outcall booking into the dullest part of the evening, which is exactly what it should be.

One thing worth saying about all of this: none of it is about concealment. Nobody is being smuggled anywhere and nothing is being managed around a member of staff. A person walks in, takes a lift, knocks on a door and later leaves the same way, which is what people do in buildings. These ninety seconds get a whole article because buildings are awkward, not because the visit is.