The duration ladder for an evening in the room

A hotel rate card changes with the season, the view and the day of the week. The house rate card changes with none of those. Its only variables are how long the reservation lasts, how many therapists attend and whether one guest or a couple is being looked after, and because each step up in length is a step up in price, it is called the ladder.

Two multipliers then sit across the hourly rungs of that column. A single guest with two therapists pays what a couple sharing one therapist pays, which is double the unit, while a couple with a therapist each pays four times it. Every combination closes with a night figure of its own, and the full grid of sums is printed on each woman's profile.

Choosing a rung around a hotel evening

Most guests pick a length by working backwards from something fixed. A dinner table at half past eight and a wish to be back in the room by eleven suggests ninety minutes. A conference day that ends at six and an early start tomorrow suggests an hour. A free evening with nothing booked after it is where two or three hours make sense, and a flight home the following afternoon is where the overnight comes into the conversation. Late arrivals, weekends and public holidays are all charged at exactly the same figures.

Where the ladder meets the deposit

The rung also settles part of the payment question. Three hours or more always carries a deposit of half, whether one therapist climbs the stairs or two. A guest booking one hour for the first time likewise sends half of that hour ahead. The lone reservation with nothing sent ahead is a known guest's same-day hour or two. The sums behind each rung are printed on every profile in the roster, and the cancellation policy works the deposit through several of its rungs.