Nothing behind the booking

By this week most of the good rooms in the Gulf will tell you they are fully booked for the thirty-first, and not one of them can tell you how many people are going to walk in.

A reservation here costs nothing to make and nothing to break. So a household planning a good night out holds three of them, across three rooms or three nights, and decides on the day, sometimes in the car on the way.

Anywhere else in business, what the venue has handed out has a name. The right to buy at a fixed price, with no obligation to take it, expiring at eight in the evening. That is an option, and an option is sold, never given away. This one is written free, several hundred times a season, by the side carrying all of the cost.

The cost arrives as a floor two thirds full on a night the book called closed, plus the walk-ins turned away since eight, plus food prepped for the covers on paper.

The instruments are ordinary and old. A card held against the booking. A deposit per head on the four nights of the year that actually matter, taken off the bill. A confirmation the day before that releases the table if nobody answers it.

Most operators I have sat with refuse all three, because asking a regular for a deposit feels like an accusation, and the scene in their head is that one awkward call rather than the forty empty seats it would have prevented.

That same regular paid a hotel a deposit this month without a second thought. Nobody is insulted by being asked. They are insulted by being asked by somebody who sounds unsure they are allowed to ask.