The arrival window on a daylight booking

Nobody is given a minute, because a minute would be a fiction. What is given is a window: forty to sixty minutes, counted from the moment the booking is actually agreed rather than from the moment your first message was typed. Those two points can sit half an hour apart if you wrote once and then went for coffee, which is the ordinary reason a window looks as though it has slipped.

Daylight neither helps nor hurts as much as people expect

Guests assume the afternoon must be slower than the small hours because the city is full. In practice the window holds at both ends of the clock, and for different reasons. At three in the morning the roads are empty but so is the transport timetable. At three in the afternoon the trams run every few minutes and there are more ways to cross the canal ring, which offsets the traffic almost exactly. What genuinely stretches a daylight window is a building rather than a street: a lift queue, a desk that wants visitors announced, a service corridor closed off while a floor is being cleaned.

Making the window shorter

Three things shorten it, and all three are on your side of the door. Write the room number as soon as you have it rather than after she has arrived in the lobby. Say in advance if the lifts want a key card during the day or if the desk announces visitors. And give the time in Amsterdam time, since a phone still set to the city you flew in from is the routine way for an afternoon to start wrong.

Anything at Schiphol or at an airport hotel falls outside the window and is quoted separately, with the journey agreed first. The rest of the sequence is on the booking page.