A Schiphol hotel massage on the evening before a morning meeting

A good share of the people who stay in airport hotels are not flying anywhere that night. They have flown in for something: a board meeting in Schiphol-Oost, a pitch at an office tower beside the station, a training day in Schiphol-Rijk, an audit that starts at eight and runs until the auditors leave. The hotel is chosen because it is ten minutes from the meeting room, and the evening in between is the only part of the trip that belongs to them. A Schiphol hotel massage fits into that evening very well, provided it is placed carefully. Put it in the wrong hour and it becomes one more thing that kept you up.

Book it before you land, not after dinner

The single largest mistake is leaving the booking until the evening itself. Airport hotels are served by arrangement, which means the house agrees the journey time with you before anything is fixed, and that agreement takes a little longer to reach than a booking in central Amsterdam, where the arrival window is a flat forty to sixty minutes. A message written at nine in the evening may still produce a session. A message written that morning, or the day before, produces the hour you actually wanted.

There is a second reason to book early. Any booking made more than twenty-four hours ahead carries a deposit of half, and so does every booking at an airport hotel, so a Schiphol evening always has a deposit attached. Arranging it the day before costs nothing extra, and it means the one decision you have to make on the evening itself is what to eat.

Choosing the hour

Work backwards from the alarm. If the meeting is at nine and the hotel is ten minutes away, the alarm is probably at half past six. Seven and a half hours of sleep puts lights-out at eleven. A session should leave time between its close and lights-out, because the body stays warm and loose for a while after an hour of massage and sleep comes more easily once that has settled a little. Thirty to forty-five minutes is about right.

That puts the useful window between half past seven and half past nine for the start. Earlier than that and dinner gets squeezed or pushed late; later and the session starts to eat the sleep it was meant to improve. Most guests who get this right settle on eight o'clock: dinner at half past six in the hotel restaurant, back in the room by half past seven, therapist at the door at eight.

Choosing the length

For a Schiphol hotel massage on a work night, ninety minutes is the length that suits. An hour is enough to take the flight out of the shoulders and not quite enough to let the mind stop rehearsing tomorrow. Two hours is generous, and on a night when sleep is the priority it can push lights-out later than you intended.

• One hour, at EUR 180: works if you arrived late and the evening is short.
• Ninety minutes, at EUR 270: the length most people choose for this evening, and the one that tends to leave the next morning clearest.
• Two hours, at EUR 360: suits a meeting that starts late, or a guest who sleeps easily after a long session.

Those are the figures for one guest with one therapist, and the full card for every format sits in each profile on the roster. A booking of three hours or more carries a deposit anyway, but near the airport so does everything else, so length makes no difference to that part.

The preparation list for a work evening

A room the night before a meeting is usually full of work. The laptop is open on the desk, a presentation is half rehearsed, shirts are hanging in the bathroom to lose their creases. Clearing it takes ten minutes, and those ten minutes are worth spending before she arrives rather than while she waits.

• Close the laptop and put it in its bag. A screen lighting up in the corner of the room with a late email pulls attention away for the rest of the hour.
• Hang tomorrow's clothes in the wardrobe, not the bathroom. She may want the bathroom, and a shirt hanging from the shower rail makes it awkward.
• Lay the next morning out: key card, badge, charger, the printed agenda if there is one. Doing it now means doing nothing after the session but sleeping.
• Set the alarm before she arrives, and then put the phone face down on the far side of the room.
• Turn the heating up to twenty-three or twenty-four degrees, and leave one lamp on.

What to eat, and when

Food matters more than people expect. A heavy dinner at half past seven followed by a session at eight is uncomfortable for everyone, and lying on your front with a full stomach is nobody's idea of rest. Eat early and eat lightly: a main course without the starter, water rather than a second glass, no dessert until afterwards if you still want one. Airport restaurants usually serve from six, which suits this evening well. If you arrived too late for the restaurant, room service ordered for after the session is a better plan than a large plate eaten beforehand.

The same thinking applies to coffee. The espresso after dinner that keeps you sharp for the email you meant to answer will keep you awake at midnight too. Near the airport, where the rooms are quiet and the evening is short, caffeine after six is the usual reason a well-planned session is followed by a restless night.

Do not drink your way into it

Airport hotel bars are designed for exactly this evening: a guest alone, a meeting in the morning, a glass that becomes three. One glass of wine with dinner does no harm. Several leave you less aware of what the session is doing, more likely to wake at three with a dry mouth, and less sharp at nine. The guests who come out of such an evening in good shape are usually the ones who kept it light, and she will notice the difference as much as you will.

During the session

Say at the start that you have an early morning. It changes nothing about what the session includes, which is for your therapist to decide and for her to explain in the room, but it lets her know that the pace should settle rather than build towards the close of the hour. Some guests fall asleep in the last twenty minutes. That is fine. She will wake you gently when the time is up rather than leave you to find the room empty.

If you realise halfway through that you would like to extend, ask. Whether it is possible depends on her evening, and extending means the extra time is paid at the same hourly rate. If the answer is no, it is no, and there is nothing further to discuss.

After she leaves

This is the part people forget to plan. Drink a glass of water. If she used oil, take a short, warm shower rather than a hot one; a hot shower wakes you up again. Do not open the laptop to look at the presentation one more time. Draw the curtains fully, because airport-hotel blackout linings are generally good but the gap at the edges lets in the apron floodlights. Then go to bed while the heaviness is still there.

People who follow that sequence usually report the same thing the next morning: they slept through the early departures for once, and walked into the meeting rested rather than wired.

When the meeting moves

Meetings move. A client pushes it to the afternoon, a colleague falls ill, the whole trip is shifted by a week. None of that is force majeure; it is an ordinary change of plan, and the deposit follows the notice scale set out on the cancellation page. With more than twenty-four hours to go, one move to a date within fourteen days is free, and the deposit travels with it. With more than twenty-four hours to go, a cancellation returns the whole deposit. Inside the last day, half the deposit is kept while she has not yet left. If you know on Monday that Tuesday's meeting is off, say so on Monday.

The Schiphol hotel massage that becomes a habit

Guests who fly in for the same kind of meeting every month tend to keep the evening the same: same hotel, same hour, often the same therapist if she keeps those evenings free. That regularity is useful. The house knows the hotel and the entrance, the journey time is already understood, and the thread takes three messages rather than ten. A repeat visit to an airport hotel still carries a deposit of half, because airport bookings always do, but everything around it becomes simple.

If the evening has a second person in it, a colleague you travel with or a partner who came along for the trip, the page on a room for two covers the formats and figures for couples, and the booking page sets out the order the messages run in.