The Saturday Bolted Onto a Trade Week

The two days that count on a working trip are often the ones nobody scheduled. A trade week finishes on Friday, the flight home is moved to Sunday afternoon, and the couple suddenly has a Saturday with nothing in it at either end. Everything this site says about arithmetic against an alarm stops applying on that day.

Why the Saturday is different in kind

Not because it is a weekend. Because of what follows it. Every evening of a working week is priced, in practice, against the morning after: how much sleep the working partner needs to be functional in a room full of people. A Saturday followed by a Sunday afternoon flight has no such morning. The session can end at midnight or at two and nothing downstream is damaged.

That single fact opens the whole ladder of lengths. Two hours becomes reasonable where ninety minutes was the practical limit. Three hours becomes possible. The eight hour block, which is the wrong shape on any weekday, becomes the thing some couples came for.

The eight hour block, briefly

Eight hours, with both ends written into the confirmation so that nobody is working it out at six in the morning. It is quoted as a single sum, and taking a therapist each lifts that sum to well over twice the shared version.

The misreading worth clearing up is that it is not eight hours of massage. It holds sleep inside it, and a shower, and a conversation, and a stretch with the lamp off, and hands that come back later. Booked as an unbroken session it would be neither pleasant nor possible. Booked as a night, it lets the hours find their own shape, which is exactly what a week of printed schedules has not allowed.

Every eight hour block carries an advance half, with no exception for anyone, so half of the two guest sum is settled once the night is agreed and the rest is one payment at the door.

Working backwards from the Sunday

Even a day with no alarm has a shape. Find the moment you have to be out of the room on Sunday, subtract the journey to the airport, and then decide how much of Sunday morning you are willing to spend horizontal. An eight hour block starting at eleven finishes at seven, which is generous with a two o'clock flight. One starting at one in the morning finishes at nine, which is tighter than it sounds once the room has to be vacated.

Couples who have done this tend to start earlier than they planned to, for the ordinary reason that a night which begins at eleven feels long and a night which begins at one feels like it has already been partly spent.

What to do with the Saturday itself

Less than you want to. The temptation after five days of programme is to treat the free Saturday as a compressed holiday and walk fifteen kilometres. That produces two tired people at nine in the evening, which is the outcome the whole added weekend was supposed to avoid.

A long slow morning, one thing in the afternoon, back by six. The working partner has five days of accumulated deficit and will not feel the bottom of it until the programme stops, which is usually Saturday around noon.

Booking it before the trade week starts

A trade week is a peak date, which means two things and neither of them is the fee. An advance half is asked for whatever the length and however short the notice, and the evenings go earlier than usual because the city is full of people with the same idea about the same weekend.

So the Saturday is worth naming in the thread at the same time as anything mid-week, even if the mid-week evening is the one you are less sure about. Reading the profiles properly, naming her yourself, and getting the hour agreed is a twenty minute job a fortnight out and an awkward one on the Friday.

The one thing the weekend does not change

What the figures are. There is no weekend rate and no peak rate; the profile figures are the whole cost of the evening, and the two guest rows are their own numbers rather than a surcharge on a single one. What changes on a Saturday is only what you can sensibly ask for, which turns out to be most of the point.