Type it. Then, in a few specific cases, add a pin as well. That is the short answer to a question that arrives in the booking thread more often than you would think, usually from a visitor who has just watched a map app try to pronounce a Dutch street name.
An outcall massage address has to do more than locate a building. It has to get one person with a bag from the pavement to the right door on the right floor, and a map pin on its own does not carry most of that information.
What a pin cannot tell anyone
A dropped pin is a pair of coordinates. It knows nothing about floors, suffixes, buzzers or which of three doors in a narrow facade is yours.
It is also less precise than it looks. In dense streets, phone location can sit a building or two away from where you actually are, particularly indoors and particularly in older quarters with thick walls. A pin sent from your bedroom may land on the neighbour's house or in the middle of the canal.
So a pin alone produces an arrival at roughly the right place, followed by a search.
The typed outcall massage address, in full
Five parts, on one or two lines.
- Street and number, spelled as on the street sign.
- The suffix: hs for the ground floor, 1, 2 or 3 for the floors above, or a letter where the building uses letters.
- The postcode: four digits and two letters. It separates streets with similar names in different parts of the city.
- The buzzer name, exactly as printed.
- Anything unusual: no lift, a gate code, a separate street door.
Copy it from the rental listing or the lease rather than retyping it from memory. The suffix is the element most often dropped, and booking a massage to your own apartment explains why that single character matters so much.
Dutch spellings that catch visitors out
Street names here are long compound words, and small differences point to entirely different places.
- Straat, gracht, kade. A street, a canal, a quay. Two addresses sharing a first half can sit a long walk apart depending on which ending follows.
- 1e, 2e, 3e. Short for eerste, tweede, derde: first, second, third. Parallel streets in De Pijp and other nineteenth-century quarters are numbered this way, and dropping the number sends someone to the wrong one.
- Oude and Nieuwe. Old and new. Paired streets and canals often carry both.
- IJ, not Y. The Dutch ij is one letter. Map searches usually forgive it, but a buzzer panel does not.
When unsure, photograph the street sign on the corner and type what it says.
When a pin earns its place
Add a pin, as well as the typed address, in four situations.
Houseboats. The number refers to a mooring on the quay, and the boats are not always in order. A pin set on the boat itself saves walking the quay comparing hulls. The houseboat massage page covers boarding and space below deck.
Large new-build complexes. One street number can cover several entrances around a courtyard. A pin placed on your entrance, not on the building's centre, helps.
Courtyard and rear houses. Some flats sit behind the street frontage, reached through a passage. The pin shows the passage.
Addresses that map apps get wrong. If your own taxi dropped you at the wrong end of the street, the therapist's map may do the same.
In all four, place the pin by hand on the exact door, rather than sending your current location, which drifts.
Check it before you send it
Paste the typed address into a map app on your own phone and look at where it lands. If the app offers a similar street in a different part of the city, the postcode is missing or mistyped. If street-level imagery is available, glance at the facade and confirm the door you expect is the one shown. Thirty seconds of checking at your end removes the most common reason for a search at hers.
What to leave out
Live location sharing is unnecessary and keeps broadcasting after it has served its purpose. Long voice notes describing the route are hard to consult while walking. A screenshot of a map without the typed address loses the suffix and the buzzer. One typed block plus, where relevant, one pin is the complete kit.
Beyond the canal ring
Addresses in the quarters around the centre follow the same rules, and a few add their own quirks. Gallery flats in Amsterdam Oost have a street number for the block and a separate number for each front door along the walkway. Include both. The booking guide's four lines assume exactly this level of detail, and a message that carries it tends to produce an arrival at the top of the window rather than the bottom.