Arrival at your door, whether that door is a hotel or a flat

Five lines, one message

Cordelia needs the name your room is booked under, the hotel or the street address, the hour you want her there, the length you are booking and a companion's name. Five lines is enough. She replies in writing with all five repeated back, plus the figure, and that reply is the booking. Nothing is held on a spoken maybe.

Keep the room number out of that first message. It is asked for once, at the confirmation stage, and it exists for a single purpose, which is getting her to the correct door without anybody being telephoned or paged.

The window, quoted straight

From a confirmed booking to a knock is usually thirty to fifty minutes in central London, and the spread depends on where she is starting from and what the roads are doing at that hour. The desk quotes the window it actually believes rather than the flattering one. If she is running behind, you hear about it while it is happening, with a new minute attached, not afterwards with an apology.

Straight up, or downstairs first

Unless you have asked for a bar, she goes up alone. Reception is not spoken to, nobody is asked to call the room, and nothing about her arrival announces itself. She is dressed for whatever setting your message described, which is the reason that message is worth two extra sentences.

If you would rather begin downstairs, say so and the confirmation names the bar rather than the room. Some guests prefer twenty minutes in a public room before anything else, and the desk has never once thought that strange.

Choosing the length honestly

An hour at £250 suits a late drink when most of the evening has already gone somewhere else. Ninety minutes at £400 is the shortest booking nobody spends watching a clock. Two hours at £500 carries supper nearby and a real conversation after it. Three hours at £700 is where second bookings tend to land, and the reason is always the same, which is that the first one ended before either party wanted it to.

Private addresses, and anything past Zone 2

Flats, houses and serviced apartments are booked exactly as hotel rooms are, on the same five lines and the same ladder. For an address outside Zones 1 and 2, Cordelia checks the return cab fare herself and folds it into the quote before you agree to anything, so a single number covers the night. There is no district figure, no weekend figure and no small hours figure. A midnight booking in Chelsea costs what a seven o'clock booking costs anywhere else.

What sits outside the figure

Her hours and her company are the whole of what is being arranged, and the terms put it in the same plain words. Everything you would have spent money on anyway stays yours: a restaurant bill, a ticket, a taxi the two of you share. There is no second list of priced additions behind this one, and no companion here costs more than another.

The names offered first for a door call

Laura, Nora and Vanessa all live in W2, minutes on foot from the station hotels, which makes them the quickest answers to a message sent after ten at night. Cindy lives five minutes off the King's Road and can often be placed the same evening. Read that as a shortlist rather than a wall, because everyone on the register takes room bookings and the reply will tell you whose hours are genuinely open.

When the night moves

Plans change and the desk would far rather rewrite a booking than let one fail in silence. With three hours of notice or more, cancelling and moving both cost nothing, and Cordelia simply finds another hour. Inside two hours half the figure stands, because those hours were closed to everybody else the moment the confirmation went out.

She waits fifteen minutes past the agreed start if you are held up. Past that the desk would rather write a fresh booking than hand you a shortened one at the same figure, and it will say which of the two is happening. The fee itself goes to her in person when she arrives, and the subject closes there for the rest of the night.