Half the Figure First: an Argument About Time

The word deposit does most of the damage. It suggests a sum parked somewhere, held against misbehaviour, returned at the end if everyone was well behaved. That is not what happens here and the mismatch causes more confusion than the rule itself ever would.

What goes ahead is the first half of the fee. Not an extra. Not a bond. The figure attached to your booking, divided in two, with the first half sent before she leaves and the second handed over at the door. Nothing is being held anywhere.

Why any of it goes ahead

Because a booking removes time from a calendar and the removal is immediate. Once a woman has agreed to be at a door at nine, that part of her evening is committed, and so in practice is the hour either side of it, which has become too short to offer to anybody else.

If nothing goes ahead, the whole of that commitment sits on one side. She has given up an evening on the strength of a message. The guest has given up nothing and can change his mind at eight fifty for the price of typing a sentence. That is not an arrangement between two parties; it is an option written in favour of one of them, and the other one pays for it.

Half of the figure going ahead makes the commitment mutual. That is the entire argument and there is nothing moral in it.

The seven cases, and the pattern underneath

It is asked for on bookings fixed more than a day ahead, on the eight hour block, on anything with two therapists in it, on rooms at Schiphol and the airport hotels, on peak dates, on sessions of three hours or longer, and on a first booking of any size.

Read the list twice and the pattern shows. Each entry is either a large piece of time, a piece of time that could not realistically be refilled at short notice, a journey arranged specially, or a booking with no history behind it. In every one of those, the imbalance described above is at its widest.

The one case without it

A returning guest, at an address inside the city, asking for one or two hours later the same day, sends nothing and pays the whole figure on arrival. The reason is the mirror image of the argument: a short booking at short notice inside the centre is the easiest kind of hour to refill, and a guest who has opened the door before has already demonstrated the part that matters.

Getting it back

More than twenty-four hours before the booked time, all of it comes back, whatever the reason and without a discussion. Inside the final day with her still at home, half of it stays and half returns. Once she has left, it stays, unless somebody else takes the hour, in which case it comes back whole.

And if you can show the real loss was smaller than the sum kept, only the smaller sum is kept. That line is written down precisely so that it does not have to be argued for.

What it never becomes

It never becomes damages. There is no circumstance in which cancelling a booking here leaves a guest owing money to anybody. The most that can happen is that a share of a fee already earned stays where it is, and the notice in your message is the only thing that decides the size of that share.

It also never becomes a lever. Nothing about a larger sum going ahead changes what a session contains, because that decision belongs to the woman who knocks and is not for sale in a thread at any figure. A guest who has understood the paragraph about time will already see why: the money buys the time and her attendance, which is exactly what the thread is in a position to sell.

A last practical note

Card first, with Revolut, Wise or cryptocurrency for anybody who prefers them. The sum and where to send it appear inside the confirmed thread and nowhere else on this site. If you ever see those details somewhere other than in a thread you are already having, they did not come from here.