Massage Parlour, Agency or Independent: Which to Book

The same booking can be arranged three ways in London and they are not interchangeable. What you gain on one axis you give up on another, and the right answer depends entirely on which axis you care about.

Massage parlours

A parlour is premises with several people working from it, a receptionist, and a rota. You turn up, you see who is available, you choose.

What it gets you: immediacy. No call, no arranging, no waiting. It is the only one of the three that works as a decision made twenty minutes beforehand.

What it costs you: choice and certainty. You see who is on shift, not who you picked, and photographs on parlour websites are frequently not of the people working. Prices look lower until the extras are itemised at the door, which is where the actual price appears.

There is also the legal wrinkle covered in the piece on UK law: premises where more than one person sells sex meet the definition of a brothel, which is why parlours in London advertise as saunas and massage shops and why their advertising is careful to the point of uselessness.

Agencies

An agency represents a number of escorts, takes the booking, and handles the arranging. The person you speak to is not the person you meet.

What it gets you: screening on both sides, a phone number that is answered by someone whose job is answering it, and a replacement if your first choice is unavailable. Profiles are maintained, photographs are checked, and rates are fixed and published rather than negotiated. If something goes wrong there is somebody to hold responsible, which is not true of the other two.

What it costs you: a margin, and a layer between you and the person. Agency rates carry the cost of the operation, so the same hour is usually £50 to £100 more than the same person would charge alone. You are also relying on the agency actually doing the screening it claims to. What London escorts actually cost breaks the rest of the spread down by area, and most of it turns out to be postcode rather than person.

The recommended listings and high class listings are where agency bookings concentrate, for the straightforward reason that maintaining a profile properly costs money.

Independents

Someone working alone, advertising herself, answering her own phone.

What it gets you: the lowest price for the same hour, because nobody is taking a cut. You also speak to the person you are booking, which settles more in one call than any amount of profile reading. Regulars get flexibility no agency can offer.

What it costs you: reliability and recourse. Phones go unanswered, bookings get cancelled at short notice, and if it goes wrong there is nobody above her to complain to. Verifying that photographs are current is entirely on you.

Which to pick

• You want certainty above all: agency. You pay for it and you get it.
• You want the lowest price and you are experienced: independent.
• You want it in the next half hour: parlour, with your expectations adjusted.
• It is your first booking: agency, without much hesitation. The margin buys a soft landing, and this is the one situation where that is worth paying for.

What actually separates good from bad

Not the model. Across all three, the same three things predict a decent evening: photographs that are consistent and current, a rate stated plainly before you ask, and a trail of independent reviews.

The absence of the third is the one that should slow you down. Anyone can build a website. Nobody can manufacture two years of unconnected people writing about the same person, which is why the review pages are worth more than any amount of copy.

A note on where they cluster

Agency incall flats concentrate around Baker Street, Great Portland Street and Warren Street, largely because the flats are the right size and the transport is good. Parlours sit further out where premises are cheaper. Independents are everywhere and concentrated nowhere.

Browse every London escort, or the newest listings if you want to see who has just started advertising.