How a hotel corridor sounds at half past eleven
Guests worry about being seen and hardly ever about being heard, which is the wrong way round in a building full of people. A corridor at half past eleven carries far less than a silent one at two.
Stand in a hotel corridor at half past eleven in the morning and listen. There is a vacuum running two floors up, which you can feel more than hear. A trolley with one bad wheel is being pushed somewhere to the left. Two members of staff are talking in a language that is not the one on the signs. A lift arrives, opens, waits, closes. Somewhere a television is on because a guest went out without turning it off.
Now stand in the same corridor at two in the morning. Nothing. A ventilation hum, and the sound of your own shoes on carpet.
Sound needs somewhere to hide
This is the part visitors have backwards. Discretion is usually imagined visually, as a question of who might see somebody arrive. In practice the thing that carries in a hotel is sound, and sound is only conspicuous when there is nothing else going on. A room that is not silent at half past eleven in the morning is one of eleven things happening on that floor. The same room at two in the morning is the only thing happening at all.
It is the same principle that makes a busy lobby easier to cross than an empty one, applied to a surface nobody thinks about. Daytime noise is cover. It is not perfect cover and it is not an invitation to be careless, but it means the afternoon starts from a more forgiving position than the small hours do.
What the building is made of matters more than the hour
Amsterdam's central hotels split roughly into two kinds. There are the older canal houses, converted room by room, with wooden floors, thin internal walls and staircases that announce everything. And there are the newer buildings, often further out towards Zuidas or on the edges of the centre, built with concrete floors and proper insulation, where you could hold a conversation at a normal volume and the room next door would never know.
The older building is charming and it is loud. If you are in one, the afternoon is the better half of the day by a clear margin, because the same footsteps on the same stairs are unremarkable at noon and conspicuous at three in the morning. If you are in a newer one, the hour matters far less and you can choose on other grounds entirely.
The street is part of it
A room over a canal in the Jordaan is quiet in the afternoon and quiet at night. A room facing Leidseplein or Rembrandtplein is busy in the afternoon and considerably busier at midnight on a Saturday, with the noise coming up from below rather than passing along the street. Guests staying near either square often assume the night is the discreet option, and for their particular window the reverse is true.
Two practical things
The first is the television, and it is the oldest trick in any hotel. Leaving it on quietly does more for a room than anything else available, costs nothing, and looks entirely ordinary to anyone in the corridor at any hour.
The second is the door itself. Older doors in converted buildings close with a bang unless somebody holds them, and that single sound travels further than everything that follows it. Hold it. It is the one moment of the whole afternoon that a neighbour is likely to register.
The point of writing it down
Not to make anybody anxious, because in the overwhelming majority of buildings none of this is noticeable in either direction. It is to correct a belief that sends people towards the small hours for a reason that does not hold. If discretion is genuinely what you are optimising for, the middle of a working day in a busy building is a better place to be than three in the morning in a quiet one.
Ventilation, and the other thing nobody checks
Older converted buildings in the centre often share a ventilation shaft between the bathrooms of several rooms, and it carries sound between floors in a way that surprises people the first time they notice it. It is loudest when everything else is quiet, which again is a point in the afternoon's favour rather than against it, because during the day the extractor fans are running everywhere at once.
If you want to know what your own room does, run the bathroom fan and stand in the main room for ten seconds. In a newer building you will hear nothing. In a canal house you will hear the shaft. Either way it takes ten seconds, it can be done on the first day of the trip, and it tells you more about the room than any amount of speculation about corridors.