My partner has a client dinner on the only night I thought was free. What now?

Move the booking rather than try to fit around it. A small client dinner starts at half past seven and finishes when the client decides, and a session placed after one of those is a session that starts at eleven or not at all. If the trip has another open night, put the evening there. If it does not, look at the night with the large reception instead: leaving a standing reception at half past eight is invisible in a way that leaving a table of six is not. The first change of date costs nothing more than twenty-four hours ahead.

How late can an evening realistically start on a weekday?

That depends on the morning rather than on the hour itself. Bookings are arranged at any hour, so the constraint is yours. Work backwards: subtract the sleep the working partner needs, subtract a shower, subtract the session, and the answer falls out. On a night before a nine o'clock start, ninety minutes beginning at nine is usually the practical limit. Before a seven o'clock start it is closer to eight, and a therapist each is worth considering, because it fits the same evening into about half the elapsed time.

We want to eat first. How long should we leave between dinner and the booking?

Two hours between the last course and the knock is a sensible minimum and three is more comfortable, particularly after the kind of dinner a company organises. If the gap cannot be that long, the better answer is to eat afterwards instead: a session at seven leaves the two of you at a table by nine in a much better state than either of you were in at six. Whichever way round you do it, write the hour into the thread rather than a range, because a range holds the whole evening open for both sides.

Can we hold two possible nights and decide later?

No, and it would not help you if you could. One hour is agreed, and it is held from the moment the advance half is settled. What replaces holding two nights is the free change of date: name the likelier evening now, and move it once if the programme turns out differently. The request has to reach the thread more than twenty-four hours before the agreed hour and the new date has to sit inside the following fortnight, which covers essentially every dinner that appears mid-week.

The dinner overran and we are going to be forty minutes late. What happens?

Write in the thread as soon as you know, because the arrival window is forty to sixty minutes from confirmation and a message sent at nine can still reshape a nine thirty knock. A later start on the same evening is usually straightforward. What is not possible is extending the finish to make up for a late start, because the hours on the other side of the booking are not yours. A session that ends at the agreed time stays payable in full for the time that was reserved.

Is there a surcharge for a late hour or for a weekend?

No. The figures in each profile are the whole cost of an evening: no evening rate, no weekend rate, no peak rate, and no travel charge inside the city. What a busy week does change is availability, not price. During a large trade week, or over King's Day, Pride, the Amsterdam Dance Event or the run from Christmas into the new year, an advance half is asked for whatever the length and however short the notice, and the evenings go earlier than usual.

Timing a Couples Massage Around Work Dinners

People arrive on a working trip thinking the constraint is the daytime. It is not. Sessions end at six and the day is genuinely over. What eats the week is the evening programme: the welcome drinks on the first night, the client dinner on the second, the team thing that appears in a corridor on the third, and the closing something on the last. A couple who want one evening together have to find the square the company has not taken, and then take it first.

The company owns more evenings than it thinks it does

Nobody sets out to occupy a colleague's whole week. It happens by accumulation. A dinner is proposed on Monday for Tuesday. On Tuesday somebody suggests Wednesday. By Wednesday afternoon the only unclaimed night is Thursday, and Thursday is now visible to everyone who also has an unclaimed Thursday.

The plus-one, meanwhile, has been waiting all day and has no way to compete with a suggestion made in person at half past five. This is not a failure of loyalty. It is simply that a vague intention to have an evening together loses to a specific invitation, every time. A booked hour is a specific thing, and specific things win.

Reading the week for the free square

Before the trip, get the programme in front of both of you and mark four categories:

Fixed and unavoidable. Anything the organisers have printed and anything involving a client. These nights are gone.
Fixed but skippable. Welcome drinks, a sector reception, a dinner with forty people at it. Attendance is noticed for the first hour and not after it.
Likely to appear. The night after the hardest day, and the last night. Somebody will propose something for both of these.
Genuinely free. Usually one night, occasionally two.

Book the genuinely free one, and if there are two, book the earlier of them. An evening in the middle of the week survives contact with the programme better than the last night, which is the night most likely to acquire a farewell dinner.

The four kinds of work dinner, and what each does to an evening

The large reception is the friendliest to a booking. It starts at seven, it is standing, and leaving at half past eight is invisible. A session beginning at nine works around it comfortably, and the working partner arrives having eaten, which is not a disadvantage.

The small client dinner is the least friendly. It starts at half past seven, it runs to eleven, and leaving early is a decision somebody else notices. Do not try to place an evening after one of these. Put the booking on a different night.

The team dinner sits in between and depends entirely on the team. If it is eight people who work together every week, it will end when it ends. If it is a table of thirty, it is a reception with chairs.

The improvised drink is the one that costs couples their evening, because it is proposed at five and accepted before anyone has thought about it. A booking already in the thread makes that answer easy: there is something at nine, and that is the end of the conversation.

After a dinner, or instead of one

Both work, and they are different evenings. After a dinner, the session starts late and the working partner arrives fed, slowed down and considerably more relaxed than they were at six. Ninety minutes at half past nine is a common shape for this. The risk is the obvious one: a dinner that runs long turns a nine thirty booking into a ten fifteen one, and the hour after that belongs to the morning.

Instead of a dinner, the session starts early and the evening has room after it. An hour at seven leaves the two of you free at eight with the night still open. Couples who have done both tend to prefer this one on a weekday and the other on the last night of the week.

The hour to write down

Two numbers decide it: when the working partner is genuinely back in the room, and when the alarm goes. Add forty to sixty minutes to the first of those, because that is the arrival window from a confirmed booking to a knock at the door, and it means the hour you write should be at least that far ahead of the moment you send the message on the day.

For an evening arranged in advance, write a specific hour rather than a range. A range invites both sides to hold the whole evening open, which is precisely what a working week cannot afford. If the hour turns out to be wrong, changing the hour within the same date is a single message.

Length against a table you cannot leave early

If the evening is on the far side of a dinner, book ninety minutes rather than two hours, and consider a therapist each rather than one therapist between the two of you. A therapist each is EUR 720 an hour against EUR 360, and it fits the same amount of evening into about half the clock, which is the whole argument when the session cannot start before half past nine.

If the evening has nothing in front of it, the arithmetic reverses. Two hours with one therapist between you at EUR 720 is the unhurried version, and it is what most couples ask for when the next morning is free. The ladder in between runs EUR 540 for ninety minutes and EUR 1,080 for three hours on the shared arrangement, and EUR 1,080 and EUR 2,160 on the two therapist one. Every figure is printed in the profiles on the roster.

Saying no to the improvised drink

This deserves its own paragraph because it is where most shared evenings are lost. At five o'clock somebody in a corridor suggests a drink, and the working partner says yes because there is no specific reason to say no. A vague plan to spend the evening together is not a specific reason and it never survives the exchange.

A confirmed hour is. It does not require an explanation, it does not have to be described, and one sentence ends the conversation without anybody feeling turned down. Couples who have booked a working trip before tend to describe this as the practical benefit rather than the evening itself, which is a slightly bleak way to put it and also accurate.

When the dinner appears after the booking

This is the ordinary case rather than the exception, and it is why the first change of date is free. Write into the thread more than twenty-four hours before the agreed hour, name the new date, keep it inside the following fortnight, and the advance half travels across untouched. Nothing further is asked for.

A second change, or one asked for on the day itself, is measured on the notice scale exactly as a cancellation written at that minute would be, and whatever the scale does not retain follows the booking to its new date. So the sensible sequence is: fix the evening early, and keep the free move for the dinner that appears on Tuesday morning. The booking terms set the scale out with figures.

What moving costs and what it does not

Nothing, inside the free move. After that, the scale is about warning rather than punishment: more than twenty-four hours ahead, nothing is retained; inside the last day with her still at home, half of the advance half is retained; once she has set out, the advance half is retained in full, unless the hour is taken by somebody else, in which case it comes back entire. Cancelling never leaves a couple owing damages to anyone.

Two evenings in one week, when the week allows it

Occasionally a programme leaves two open nights, and a couple staying five or six nights sometimes wants both. The sensible split is one short and one long: an hour or ninety minutes mid-week, placed against a working morning, and a longer evening on the last free night when the morning after is a flight rather than a session. Booking both in the same thread at the same time is simpler than coming back to it, and it means the second evening is fixed before anybody proposes anything for it.

What is not worth doing is spreading a single evening thin across two nights. An hour on Tuesday and an hour on Thursday is two arrival windows, two sets of logistics and two interruptions to a week that already has too many, and most couples who have tried it say the single longer evening was the one they remember.

Eating and the session

A large dinner and a session an hour later are not a comfortable combination for the person who ate it. Two hours between the last course and the knock at the door is a reasonable minimum, and three is better. If the dinner is the fixed point, the honest move is to put the booking on a different night rather than to squeeze it into ninety minutes of digestion.

The opposite case is easier. A session at seven with something to eat afterwards works well and the two of you end up at a table at nine in a considerably better state than the rest of the week managed. On a trip where the days belong to other people, that is most of what an evening has to do.

Timing a couples massage around dinners with colleagues