Three Hours Is Usually the Length You Meant

Length is the decision people spend the least time on and go on to regret more than any other. It gets made in about four seconds, usually by taking the shortest option on the assumption that it is the sensible one, and the assumption is wrong more often than it is right.

This is not an argument for spending more money. It is an argument for spending the same money on the right thing, and quite often that means fewer bookings of a sensible length rather than several short ones.

What the first twenty minutes are

Arrival, the conversation at the start where she says where her limits sit, the practical business of the room, and the stretch during which two people who have not met stop being strangers. That is not wasted time and it cannot be skipped, but it is real time and it comes out of whatever you booked.

Book an hour and you have bought forty minutes on the other side of that stretch. Book two and you have bought an hour and forty. The proportion is what makes the difference, not the absolute number, and it is why the jump from one hour to two feels much larger than a doubling.

Where the hour comes from

An hour is the default because an hour is what people book for things. A haircut, a meeting, a class. It arrives in the head already fitted, and it gets chosen before anybody has asked whether it fits this.

There is also a quieter reason, which is that a first booking with anybody feels like a trial. That instinct is sound in general. It just sits badly here, because the shortest version of this particular arrangement is the one that shows it at its least characteristic.

The figures, since they are the other half of the decision

One hour is 180 euros. Ninety minutes is 270. Two hours is 360. Three hours is 540, and each hour past the third is another 180. The eight hour block for one guest is 1,250.

Read them as a ladder rather than as separate purchases and something becomes visible. The second hour costs the same as the first but delivers considerably more of what the booking was for, because the fixed overhead at the start has already been paid out of the first one.

Who should book three

Anybody who finds himself hesitating between two hours and something longer. Anybody whose evening has no hard stop after it. Anybody who has booked an hour before and spent part of it aware of the clock.

Three hours is also the length at which the evening stops being an appointment. Guests describe the difference in almost the same words each time: at one hour you are conscious of time, at two you stop checking, at three the question does not arise.

Who should not

Anybody with a flight, an early meeting or a dinner afterwards. A session ending early is still paid at the booked figure, because the time was held for you and cannot be handed to anybody else at that point, so a three hour booking with a hard stop at the two hour mark is two hours at a three hour price.

Anybody who is very tired should also think twice, and this is the honest one. Guests fall asleep more often than they expect, nobody is offended by it, and the fee still stands. If it is late and the evening has already been long, the shorter booking is the accurate one rather than the cautious one.

The one that is genuinely different

The eight hour block is not a long session; it is a different kind of booking, with a start time agreed like any other and a defined end eight hours later. It always carries half of the figure in advance, whoever is booking and however far ahead.

It is worth saying plainly that most people who ask about it are describing three hours. If you find yourself drawn to it because a longer booking sounds better in principle, read the ladder again first. Three hours is usually the thing that was meant, and it is available tonight.

If you want a rule of thumb rather than an argument, here is one. Book the length you would choose if you already knew the evening was going to go well. Guests almost never regret that number. The one they regret is the cautious figure picked in four seconds, on the unexamined assumption that caution was free.