Guests spend a lot of thought on which format to book and almost none on the room they will be lying in. This is the wrong way round. At two in the morning the room is doing at least as much work as anything else, and unlike most of the night it is entirely under your control.
Four things. None of them complicated.
The ceiling light is the enemy
Overhead light at this hour is unforgiving in a way that is hard to argue with once it is pointed out. It flattens a room, it is aimed directly at the face of anyone lying down, and it announces that this is a place where things are done rather than a place where the night ends.
Turn it off. Use a bedside lamp, or two if the room has them. If the only lamp is harsh, drape something over the shade, or point it at a wall and use what bounces back. A hotel room with a single ceiling fitting and no lamp at all is worth noting when you book, because it is a genuine constraint rather than a preference.
Warmer than you think
Core temperature falls through the night and the trough sits in the small hours. A room that felt fine at midnight is cold at three, and a body on a bed with oil on it loses heat far faster than a body under a duvet. Almost every complaint about a late session being less relaxing than expected turns out to be a room that was two degrees too cold.
Put the heating up before she arrives rather than during, since a room takes time to catch up. If you have a spare towel, leave it out. If the window has been open for the evening, close it half an hour ahead.
Close the curtains properly
This one is about after rather than during. In June the light here is up before five and a gap of ten centimetres will wake you at quarter past, which is a poor reward for a session that finished at three. Pull them closed the whole way, overlap them if they overlap, and deal with the gap where they meet. It takes fifteen seconds and it is the single most common regret of a summer night booking.
In winter the opposite consideration applies, mildly: if you want the light to help you wake at eight, leave a deliberate gap. The point is to decide rather than to discover.
Clear one surface and count the money out
The fourth is administrative and it removes the only awkward moment a late booking tends to contain. The balance is paid at the door when she arrives, so have it counted and somewhere obvious. Nobody wants to be searching a jacket at half past two while someone stands in a doorway.
And clear a surface. Not the whole room, which is nobody's business, but one flat space that is not the floor. It is a small courtesy and it makes the first two minutes of a visit easier than they otherwise are.
The things that are not worth doing
Candles, on the whole, particularly in rented rooms. Music, unless you actually want it, since silence at three in the morning is usually better than a playlist chosen at three in the morning. Elaborate rearrangement of furniture, which takes effort you will want later and rarely improves anything. Scented anything, which in a closed room at this hour tends to become a great deal more noticeable than it seemed when you opened it.
And there is no need to prepare anything at all in the way of explanations. Nobody at your building is asked anything about you, and an arrival at two is less conspicuous than one at ten in the evening, for the reasons in the note on two in the morning.
Use the window
All of the above fits comfortably inside the forty to sixty minutes between a confirmed booking and a knock. That window is the ideal time for it: shower, heating up, lamp on, curtains dealt with, money counted, phone face up and sound on so the last two minutes of the arrival do not go unanswered. The note on using the window puts it in order.