The arrival window is forty to sixty minutes, counted from a confirmed booking to a knock at the door, and it is the same figure in every central neighbourhood at every hour of the night. Most guests spend it in the least useful possible way, which is sitting on the end of a bed looking at a phone and mentally recalculating how long forty minutes is.
It is a genuinely useful stretch of time and there is a sensible order to it.
First: shower
Do this at the start rather than at the end of the window, so there is no scenario where a knock arrives while you are wet. Take it hot. If it has been a long evening, this is the part of the window that does the most work, and it also solves the question people are too polite to ask, which is whether they should have showered.
Take the phone into the bathroom. This matters more than it sounds, because the last few minutes of an arrival sometimes need you, and a phone in another room is how a solved entry becomes an unsolved one.
Second: the room
Heating up a notch, since a room that felt fine at midnight will be cold at half past two and a body on a bed loses heat quickly. Ceiling light off, lamp on. Curtains closed properly, which is a job for now rather than for four in the morning when you will not do it well. One surface cleared. The note on preparing a room covers each of these.
Third: the money and the door
Count the balance out and put it somewhere obvious, because the fee is settled at the door on arrival and nobody enjoys the version where a guest is going through a jacket while someone waits.
Then think about the last twenty metres. Street door on a code, lift that needs a keycard, night entrance around the side, or a staffed reception where nothing is needed from you. If the entrance needs anything, it should already be in the thread from the first message, and if you forgot, now is when you send it rather than in nine minutes. If the lift wants a card, the window is also when you decide to go down rather than wait upstairs.
Fourth: something to drink, and something small to eat
Water, within reach of the bed. If it has been a long time since you ate, something plain and small. Not a meal and not at the last minute, but a body running on nothing since eight in the evening does not respond well to two hours of work at three in the morning.
What not to do with it
Do not start anything that will not be finished. Not a phone call, not an episode of something, not a conversation that needs a conclusion. The window is designed to be interrupted and anything that resists interruption will make the knock feel like an inconvenience rather than the thing you arranged.
Do not drink more. This is the most common way a well-planned late booking goes slightly wrong, and it is worth saying plainly: whatever the evening has already been, the window is not the moment to add to it.
And do not watch the clock. Forty to sixty minutes is a range rather than a promise of forty, and the difference between the two ends of it is not an error. Confirm at ten past two and the knock belongs somewhere in the stretch before three, which is exactly what the range was describing.
That is worth saying because the last ten minutes of a window are where impatience does its damage. A guest who has spent forty minutes checking a phone opens the door already slightly wound up, which is the opposite of the state the next two hours were arranged to produce. The list above exists mostly to give those minutes something to do.
Why the window exists at all
Because the house has no premises anywhere and every booking is outcall, which means the journey is real and it is hers rather than yours. The figure is published as a range because it is honest as a range, and it is uniform across the centre because the differences between neighbourhoods disappear once someone is ready and moving. The arrival window entry sets out how it is measured and what does not shorten it.