Aparthotel massage: the self-service lobby

The format has grown quickly in Amsterdam, and a fair share of reservations now come from one. From the street it looks like a hotel: a lobby of sorts, a lift, numbered doors and a card to open them. Behind the door it behaves like a flat, with a kitchen corner, sometimes a washing machine, and cleaners who visit on a schedule of days rather than every morning.

The entrance half

Aparthotels usually keep a lighter staff at night than a full-service hotel. After ten or eleven the desk may be empty, and the outer door runs on a code or the guest's card. That tends to make an arrival simpler, since there is little lobby to cross and often nobody in it. What it asks is that the guest knows how his own entrance behaves after dark: whether the street door opens with the card, whether a code is needed, and whether the lift is locked. Guests on a long stay who have never come home late are often unsure, so it is worth checking on the evening of booking. The journal note what an aparthotel changes covers this further.

The flat half

Housekeeping that comes twice a week instead of daily sees the same apartment more often in its lived-in state, and knows its usual look. That changes nothing about how a visit is conducted, because every visit is designed on the expectation that someone will look at the room afterwards: linens and towels come in the bag and go out in it, and furniture goes back to where it stood. It is simply a good reason for the method, explained under housekeeping.

The same reservation

An aparthotel costs what any other address costs, EUR 180 for an hour upward, and she reaches it within forty to sixty minutes like anywhere central. It counts as an outcall like everything else. The only limit is geographic: an aparthotel inside Amsterdam is covered, while one in a town nearby is not, however close it looks on a map.