The long booking: several days arranged as one thing
Anything running past a single night is arranged here. A weekend, three days around a conference, a week while you are in London on business, or a stretch where a companion is simply part of the diary rather than an appointment in it. A night on its own is supper to morning at £1,800, and everything longer than that is quoted once, in writing, after the dates and the shape are known.
These are not hourly bookings stacked on top of each other, and the desk will not quote them as if they were. Long bookings have their own rhythm, with hours in them where she is not with you at all, and pretending otherwise produces a figure nobody would agree to. Kensington and the City of London generate most of them, and the women who take them are named on their own pages in the register.
What Cordelia needs before quoting
The dates, where you are staying, what is already fixed inside those days, and roughly how much of them you want company for. A week where she joins you for four dinners is a different arrangement from a week where she is there from breakfast onwards, and the difference has to be settled before a figure means anything.
How the quote is written
As one number for the whole arrangement, with the dates, the start, the finish and the companion's name in the same message. It is not a running total and it does not move afterwards. You read it, you agree to it or you do not, and nothing is held open on a maybe while you decide.
Long bookings still sit on the same ladder underneath, which is why a quote for three days looks like the figures on the rates page rather than something invented for the occasion.
Hours off, which every long booking needs
Nobody is good company for seventy two hours without a break, and a desk that claims otherwise is selling you a worse arrangement than it thinks. The quote sets out which hours are hers, which are yours and where the two of you are simply in the same city doing different things. Guests who have done this before ask for more of those hours, not fewer.
Where a long booking happens
Usually in London, at your hotel or your flat, occasionally somewhere else entirely when the booking travels. If it leaves the country it becomes a trip and is arranged as travelling with you instead, with the documents and the route settled first. Cordelia will tell you which of the two headings your plan actually belongs under before anything is priced.
Notice, and why it is longer here
A week booked out of a companion's diary is a week she cannot fill any other way, so these are settled well ahead. A fortnight is comfortable, a few days is sometimes possible, and a same day request for anything of this size will simply be answered no. The desk would rather refuse a booking than confirm one it cannot deliver properly.
Four names who take the longer arrangements
Danielle asks for three hours as her shortest evening and is at her best when a booking has room in it. Milena plans around music and takes weekends. Samanta works Thursday to Saturday and is easy company across several days. Patricia is unhurried by temperament and says outright that long bookings suit her best.
Who books days instead of hours
People spending a working week in London who would rather come back to company than to a lobby. Guests here for a run of events who need the same person beside them at each one instead of a new introduction every night. Occasionally someone who has simply discovered that four hours is not long enough and has decided to stop booking them one at a time.
What they have in common is that they want the arrangement settled once and then forgotten about. That is exactly how the desk writes these. One quote, one confirmation, one companion, and no further negotiation at any point during the days themselves, which leaves both of you free to think about something else.
Changing a long booking once it is agreed
Dates move and the desk moves with them where the diary allows, which it often does with enough warning. Tell Cordelia as soon as you know rather than the night before. A long booking cancelled well ahead costs nothing at all, and one cancelled at the last moment is handled in writing under the same rule as every other length.
The fee reaches the companion in person at the start of the arrangement, and the written quote is the only record that exists of any of it. If the dates change, the new ones are confirmed in writing just as the first ones were, so that record never falls behind the plan.
Two notes worth reading first
Other arrangements
One line is enough
Write the district, the hour and the number of hours. What comes back has a name in it, a time in it and a figure in it, and nothing moves after that.