Read the floor plan

Whether a hotel is built for this holiday was settled by an architect, and marketing was not in the room.

Gulf families book the Eid break late, and not out of carelessness. The dates are not certain until the month is nearly finished, so much of the demand arrives in the final week for a stay beginning within days, somewhere around the twentieth this year depending on the sighting.

They also do not travel as two adults and one child. They travel as the word means it here: the grandmother, two or three siblings with their own children, an aunt, sometimes a nanny and a driver. Ten to fourteen people who want to be behind one door if that is possible and on one corridor if it is not, and who choose the property that can hold them together.

Which is why the honest answer about a hotel's Eid is a number nobody in marketing quotes. How many connecting rooms sit in the inventory. How many suites have a second bedroom. How many adjoining keys can be released as a block, on one call at nine at night.

That number is the floor plan, and it was drawn ten or twenty years ago by somebody solving for corridors and risers who had no view about this holiday at all.

The campaign knows none of it. It says family, over a photograph of four people at a breakfast table, in a market where four is not the number.

So the property with the campaign takes the enquiry and loses it on the phone, offering two rooms on separate floors. The property with the connecting rooms takes the booking without a campaign, at the rate it likes, in the week nothing else is left.

The brief was written this season. The floor plan was written a decade ago, and the guest only ever sleeps in the floor plan.