Check-in was fine

At half past one in the morning, after a flight that landed two hours late, a guest at a front desk in Riyadh's Olaya is not looking at anything the hotel is proud of.

The lobby smells of something woody and warm. There is a flask of Saudi coffee on the counter, a stack of small cups without handles, a bowl of dates. Upstairs, the twelfth floor looks out over King Fahd Road, lit in both directions. These are what the reviews talk about, and every one of them comes in degrees. The coffee can be stronger. The scent can be too much. The view gets better with each floor.

He is watching the screen.

Whether the booking is there, under whichever English spelling of his name the person who made it happened to choose. Whether the room, booked for a date that is now yesterday, is still being held for him. Then the card, which has to work twice, once in the lift and once at the door.

None of those comes in degrees. A booking cannot be mostly found. The room is either still his or it went to someone else at midnight. The card works, or he is back in the lift with his bag.

When these parts work, they earn half a sentence in a review at most: check-in was fine.

When one of them fails, it is the whole review, and nobody remembers there were dates.