Guides

These are the questions people research quietly, late, in a window they close afterwards. What the conventions actually are. What a phone keeps and for how long. What things cost, and why nobody will say. Where the law stands in the country you happen to be standing in, which is rarely where you assumed it stood.

The first guide published is what a night costs, and it sets the pattern for the rest: the checkable figures first, then the reason the remaining numbers are never printed anywhere.

We write these because the honest answers are scattered across forums, sales pages and statutes drafted for lawyers, and because being wrong about any of them runs from mildly embarrassing to genuinely serious.

What the section covers

Etiquette and convention. How introductions work in a culture built on discretion, what reads as rude, and what the unwritten rules are for. Most of them exist for the safety of the person on the other side of the arrangement. Worth knowing that before deciding they are fussy.

Privacy and digital safety. What a phone, a card statement and a hotel booking system each record, how long each one keeps it, and which of the three you can do anything about. Readers reliably worry about the wrong layer, and they worry about it with great diligence.

Money. What the high end costs, how the pricing is actually structured, and why the published figure and the paid figure diverge as far as they do. The gap is not shiftiness. It is function, and it is legible once you know what the number is being asked to do.

Law by country. The position on sex work, solicitation, advertising and third-party involvement differs in almost every jurisdiction, and often differs again between a country and its own cities. We set out what is written down, with dates. We are not lawyers and none of it is legal advice.

Safety. Screening, meeting in public, telling someone where you are going to be. The unglamorous part, and the part that matters most.

How these are written

Each guide leads with the answer and puts the reasoning underneath, so the ten seconds you came for are the first ten. Stay for the rest if the subject turns out to be more interesting than you expected, which it usually does.

Where a guide depends on where you are, it says so and points at the relevant profile in the City Index. Where it turns on a term you have seen used three different ways by three different people, the Encyclopedia settles which one we mean.

Nothing in this section is a recommendation to buy anything, and we have no commercial relationship with any operator, agency or platform. Our editorial standards set out what that means in practice, including what we will not publish.