Glossary

False bookings and the empty hotel corridor

A false booking is one its sender never meant to honour, placed under an invented identity, through someone else's number or as a joke; the house records and reports it.

A false booking differs in kind from a cancelled one. Cancelling is what a real person does when an evening changes shape; a false booking was never meant to be honoured. It may be placed under a name the sender does not bear, through a phone number or an account belonging to somebody else, as a prank between friends, or by a person who supplies an address and an hour with no plan to be behind that door when she knocks.

From the sending end of a message the harm is easy to underrate. A nuru booking sets a whole chain moving: a therapist declines other requests for those hours, packs gel, cover and towels, and crosses the city late, frequently alone, toward a building she knows only as a line of text. If nobody answers, or the name at the door proves to be invented, the evening is lost, and, far more seriously, she has been sent to a stranger's door on a pretext.

What follows

The identifiers used for the booking are kept on file. When the circumstances warrant it, the relevant authorities are informed. Those identifiers are also passed to reputable houses elsewhere in Amsterdam, which means the same name or number meets an office already warned when it next appears.

A client who writes under their own name, from their own phone, and opens the door at the agreed time will never meet any of this; an honest booking is untouched by it in every respect. The record is kept for forty-five women who walk into unfamiliar hotels and flats at every hour, and for no other purpose.

The ordinary sequence of a booking is on the booking page; the entry on the WhatsApp thread explains how a written exchange keeps both sides honest, and the cancellation policy places the false booking beside the genuine cancellation.

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