A surprising number of hotels in this city are not one building. A canal-side property may have grown by buying the house next door and then the one behind it, and a larger hotel may keep an annex room block across a courtyard, down a side street or over a bridge. Guests often do not find out until check-in, when the desk hands over a key and points back out through the front door. For a massage booking, an annex room is entirely workable. It simply alters the route, and the route is the part of the evening we plan most carefully.
Why the annex room changes the route
An ordinary hotel arrival is a straight line: street, lobby, lift, corridor, door. Everything that keeps it unremarkable, as the discreet booking guide explains at length, depends on that line matching what every other guest does. An annex breaks the line in one of three ways, and each calls for a slightly different sentence in the message.
The first kind has its own street entrance, usually locked, opened with the room key, and with no desk behind it. The second is reached through the main building, across a courtyard or along a connecting passage, sometimes through a door that only opens with a keycard. The third is a separate house with its own small reception that closes in the evening, after which guests let themselves in with a code or a key. In all three, sending a therapist to the main lobby is the wrong instruction, because the main lobby is not on the way to your room, and a visitor who walks in and then straight back out has done the one thing a lobby notices.
What to put in the message
Tell us the room is in the annex and which of those three shapes it takes. The ideal line reads something like: room is in the second building, own entrance on the side street, locked, I will come down. That is enough for her to walk directly to the right door, message you from the step, and be inside within a minute without crossing any public space at all. If the entrance is a passage through the main building, say whether the connecting door needs a card; if it does, the arrangement mirrors a card-locked lift, and you meet her at that door rather than in the lobby.
The room number can still come last, just as the earlier note on sending the room number late describes. The building is what we need first, because it decides which street she walks down.
Street doors after dark
An annex entrance on a residential street is quieter than any lobby, and at eleven at night it is often completely deserted. That is an advantage. It also means the door itself is the only point in the arrival where anyone stands still, so the aim is to keep that pause as short as it can be. Be near the door when the message comes that she is a few minutes away. Do not prop it open for her; annex doors are locked for good reason, and a street door left ajar is exactly what a neighbour or a night porter reports.
If your room is on an upper floor of a narrow house, expect a steep staircase and a small landing. That is normal for the older buildings and it is covered in the note on the third floor with no lift. Nothing about the session needs the building to be grand.
Codes, keys and the small reception
Where the annex has its own desk that closes early, the situation before closing is simply an ordinary lobby, and after closing it is an ordinary locked door. The only thing worth checking is the hour. A booking for half past nine at a house whose desk shuts at ten means she walks past a member of staff; a booking for half past ten means she does not. Neither is a problem, but it helps to know which one you have arranged, so the message describes the right one.
Never send a door code by message. Come down and open the door instead. A code typed into a chat is a code that now exists somewhere other than in your head, and it takes less than a minute to walk down a flight of stairs.
Timing, prices and the rest
The arrival window does not move: twenty to thirty minutes in the centre after the confirmation, which itself takes about ten. The annex adds nothing to the price, which stays at €180 an hour, and nothing to the length of the session, because the minutes at the door belong to the arrival rather than to your hour.
If the property is one of the old canal hotels, the Centrum hotel guide describes the building types you are likely to be staying in, including the houses that were joined together over the centuries and the separate entrances that followed. Annex rooms are commoner in that part of the city than anywhere else, precisely because the hotels there grew one narrow house at a time.
The annex is frequently the quietest room a hotel owns. It sits away from the bar, away from the lifts and away from the corridor traffic of the main building, and with one clear line in the message it becomes the easiest arrival of the night rather than the most complicated one.