Booking in September, When the City Fills Up Again

Amsterdam has a rhythm and it is not subtle. August is loose. September tightens. Conferences return, the dance event fills a week in October, and then the run from Christmas into the new year does something similar for a fortnight. Pride and King's Day do it for a day or two each.

Two things are worth separating out about those dates, because guests tend to merge them and worry about the wrong one.

What does not change

Any figure. An hour with one therapist is EUR 180 on a Tuesday in February and EUR 180 during a conference week. There is no surcharge for a date, a weekend, an evening or a distance inside the city. The arrival window is the same forty to sixty minutes across the centre.

One thing does change, and it is administrative rather than financial: on a busy date, half the figure goes ahead, even on a shape of booking that would otherwise carry nothing in advance. Ask in the thread and the house names the dates it is counting.

What does change

Availability, which is a different thing from price. Twenty-three women each arrange their own week, and on a busy date the hours left in those weeks run out earlier. The roster does not expand to meet a conference.

For most guests that is an inconvenience. For the specific guest this site is written for, it is a trap, and it is worth naming as one.

The deliberation problem

A guest who is uneasy about his own body does not decide and then book. He decides, then waits, then reconsiders, then drafts a message, then closes it, then comes back to it four days later. That pattern is so common it is close to a rule, and on an ordinary week it costs nothing, because the hours are there whenever he finally writes.

On a busy date it costs the booking. The fortnight of deliberating is exactly the fortnight during which the hour he wanted disappeared, and what he experiences is a reply saying that the person he named has no room. That reads, to a person already inclined to read things that way, as a verdict. It is a calendar.

What to do about it

Write earlier than you feel ready to, and write a shorter message than you were planning. The message does not commit you to anything: nothing is agreed and nothing is held until an hour is settled and the front half is arranged, and up to that point a thread that stops costs nothing at all.

If the date is uncertain, say so. An hour can be pencilled in a general way and settled properly later. If your own day is unpredictable, for a physical reason or any other, write early and fix the hour on the day once you know.

The autumn advantage

One thing in favour of booking into this part of the year rather than the summer, and it has nothing to do with availability. The rooms are better. The heating is on, which quietly solves the variable this journal keeps returning to, and nobody has left a window on the latch because the canal was warm. A guest who is nervous about being uncovered will have an easier hour in October than in a cool, draughty room in May.

The stairs are the same. The beds are still short. But the room will be warm, and that is worth more than most people expect.

Which dates to ask about

Rather than guessing, ask. The house names the dates it is counting when the question is put in the thread, and the list is shorter than people assume: a day or two each for the big city dates, a week in October, the fortnight across Christmas and the new year, and the particular conference weeks. Everything outside those is an ordinary week, whatever the season looks like from a hotel booking site.

The other side of it

A quieter week has one real advantage for a first booking, and it is not availability. There is room in it to choose on pace rather than on who happens to be free. A nervous guest should be reading the profiles for how somebody works rather than for whether she can come on Thursday, and in February that is a luxury he actually has. In the middle of a conference week the hour decides and the reading gets skipped.