Between your message and our reply, a small machine turns over. Here is what it does.
We tell every guest the same thing: send the message, and the confirmation arrives within about ten minutes. From the outside those ten minutes are silence. From the inside they are the busiest part of the booking, and how they are spent explains most of what makes the night run smoothly.
Minute one: a person reads your message. Not a bot, not an autoresponder, we tried both over the years and retired both, because a guest deciding at 23:40 whether tonight is the night deserves a reply written by someone awake.
Minutes two through six: the question goes to the woman you named. She is asked whether she wants the booking, at that hour, at that address, and if you gave two or three names, each is asked in turn. Nothing is booked for a therapist without her yes, and she owes nobody a reason for a no; one who has just climbed five flights of canal-house stairs twice tonight decides for herself whether she wants a third. If none of the names you gave is free, the reply says so and leaves the choosing to you.
Minutes seven through ten: the reply to you. Her name, the hour agreed, an arrival window of typically forty to sixty minutes in central Amsterdam, and anything we need from you, which is usually just the room number when you are ready to share it.
You can make the ten minutes shorter. The fastest bookings arrive as one message with four facts in it: the therapist you would like, the area of your hotel, the duration and the time. “Near Leidseplein, two hours from 1am, Clara if she is free” is a booking that can be answered almost on reading. The slowest are twenty messages of one question each, all welcome, all answered, but the clock starts properly once the where, the when and the who are known.
Why not make it instant? Because instant means automated, and automated means nobody asked her. The ten minutes are the asking. Somewhere in them, a woman on the roster decided she wanted your booking, and the hour was agreed on that basis. We have never found a way to compress that to zero, and we have stopped trying.