Very little, and it is all practical. But people book without knowing whether they are supposed to prepare something, so here is the actual list — the room, the conversation at the start, and the honesty that makes the hour work.
A recurring question before a first booking is some version of what am I meant to do. The answer is genuinely almost nothing, but almost nothing is not nothing, and the parts that do matter are worth naming rather than leaving to be guessed at.
This practice is outcall only. There is no studio and there never has been, so the session happens wherever you are — a hotel room or an apartment, anywhere in central Amsterdam. That means the space is yours rather than ours, and there are three things about it that make a difference.
Warmth is the first. A room that is a little warmer than you would normally keep it changes the session more than anything else on this list, because a body that is cold cannot settle and no amount of unhurried work will persuade it otherwise.
A surface is the second, and a bed is fine. Nothing needs to be cleared, rearranged or made ready in any elaborate way.
The third is quiet. Not silence — a city street is fine. But a television left on, or a phone that will ring, will keep pulling the hour back to the outside world.
There is a short exchange before anything begins in which the therapist establishes what the session includes. Your part in it is to answer plainly. That is the single most useful thing anyone does across an entire booking.
Plainly includes not being sure. It includes saying that you would rather decide as you go, which results in a session that starts narrow and stays narrow unless you say otherwise. What it does not include is implying, hinting, or assuming a shared understanding. Nobody here is trying to read between lines, and a therapist who guesses is a therapist getting it wrong.
This is the one that people find hardest and it is the one that matters most in the moment. If pressure is wrong, if a position is uncomfortable, if something has drifted somewhere you did not want it to go, say so. Immediately, in ordinary words, without a preamble.
It is not an interruption and it does not derail anything. A therapist will adjust and carry on, and nothing about the rest of the hour is affected. The alternative — lying there waiting for it to change on its own — costs you the session, and it happens more than it should because people are being polite.
The last one is harder to put in a list because it is not a task. There is no response you are supposed to produce and no sign you are supposed to give that things are going well. A quiet session is not a failed one. Whatever arrangement you are used to where enjoyment has to be demonstrated to be counted, it does not apply here, and dropping it is most of what people mean when they say the second booking was better than the first.
Payment happens on arrival rather than at the end, which keeps the close of the session from being a transaction. Cash in any major currency at the day's rate, card, or crypto — all three are equally fine. The full ladder is on the prices page, and there is no night, weekend or travel surcharge anywhere inside the ring.
Time is worth being realistic about. Book the length you can actually give rather than the length that sounds right, and leave the other side of it clear if you can. Remaining questions — discretion, cancellations, what happens if a plan moves — are covered on the FAQ, and the booking page sets out what is useful to include in a first message.