How to book an erotic massage

Start from the city. Each city page shows venue cards with photos, an address and the contact buttons the salon has given us. You can scan the list or open the erotic massage page to compare cities. If a salon has a website button, open it before writing. The site usually names the styles the house works with, which is the vocabulary you will want to use when you book.

Cities with the most salons on AdultPlaces today include Bangkok, Las Vegas, Prague, London, Budapest and New York; smaller lists sit in Athens, Madrid and Hanoi.

The choice of channel is more cultural than you might expect. Across the salons on AdultPlaces, almost all have a phone button, and about two in three also have a chat button. The split by country is sharp: among salons outside the United States, more than four in five show a chat button, while in the US only a small share do, closer to one in six.

In practice, most salons we list in Europe and Southeast Asia, from Warsaw to Vietnam, can be reached over chat, while most salons in the United States expect a phone call. Chat is useful for a first booking because you can read the reply later and keep the address in writing. If a salon only shows a phone number, call and keep the question short rather than leaving a long voicemail.

A good first message is three or four short lines. Give the day and a window of time, say how long you would like the session (an hour and an hour and a half are the usual lengths people ask for), name the style as the salon's own page writes it, and ask what the price is for that style and length. If you have a preference for a particular masseuse, name her once; if not, say you are open.

• Day and arrival window, not a single exact minute.
• Session length you have in mind.
• Style name copied from the salon's site.
• A plain question about the price.

Keep the tone normal. You are booking an appointment, not negotiating what will happen in the room. The masseuse sets her own limits, and the first message is not the place to test them.

Prices and opening hours are not published on AdultPlaces, so ask the salon to confirm the address, the exact door and the arrival time in its reply, and read that reply carefully. In older European centres the number on the street is sometimes a courtyard entrance, with a code or an intercom name that is different from the salon's trading name. Ask for that detail if the reply does not include it.

If you are using a map app, paste the address the salon wrote back, not the one from a search result. For a longer trip across town, our first time guide covers what the appointment itself looks like, which can help you plan the hour before.

Arrive within a few minutes of the time you agreed, not a long stretch early and not well after the slot. Salons often run back to back appointments, so a late arrival can mean a shorter session rather than a later start. If you are running behind, send one short message as soon as you know, and let the salon tell you whether the slot still works.

If you need to cancel, do it as early as you can and in the same channel you booked on. A brief, polite cancel keeps the door open for another day; a silent no show does the opposite. The same courtesy is worth reading across to our sex club etiquette notes, which rest on the same idea.

Keep the chat about the appointment. Do not ask for a list of acts, do not try to agree in advance what the masseuse will or will not do, and do not send pictures of yourself unless the salon asks. Those messages often go unanswered, and sometimes get a booking refused. Consent is a conversation that happens in the room, between two adults, with words; it is not something you fix over chat the night before.

Avoid pressing for a discount, and avoid asking a masseuse to meet somewhere other than the salon address. If a reply feels off, step back and try a different listing in the same city.

Payment is the one practical point worth settling before you book. Ask how payment works: whether the salon takes cards or chat payments, or whether to bring cash in the local currency. Draw the money before you arrive rather than hunting for a machine on the street at the last minute.

Bring the exact address on your phone, a charged battery and, if the city is new to you, a note of the nearest metro stop. For couples thinking about going together, our couples guide covers how that conversation runs. Everything else, the room, the music, the small talk at the door, belongs to the salon and the hour you booked.