Spend enough nights arranging visits to hotels and you develop a professional respect for the man behind the marble. The night porter is the last generalist in the building: doorman, security, switchboard and witness, alone with the lobby from midnight until the breakfast shift relieves him. The visits this house arranges pass through his lobby several times a week, so it pays to understand what his job actually is.
What registers
Not faces. A porter at the far end of a double shift could not describe one visitor in ten, and knows it. His attention goes to the things he answers for: who is in the building, whether a sleeping floor stays quiet, and whether a stranger knows where they are going. A caller who can say which guest she is visiting answers his only real question, and he is right to ask it.
That is why a visit arranged here keeps to his rules rather than working around them. If a building asks callers to give a name, she gives the guest's first name; if it asks guests to collect their visitors, the guest comes down.
What the house does with the knowledge
It asks the guest the useful questions before anyone sets out: the floor, the lift, and whether the building asks visitors to announce themselves. She then arrives knowing the building's rules, because they were settled in the booking thread, and follows them as any visitor would.
What he genuinely does not care about
It is worth saying plainly: the porter is not a moral authority and has no wish to be one. Guests receive visitors; that has been true since hotels existed, and the profession made its peace with it long before any of us were born. What he minds is disturbance, noise on a sleeping floor, a stranger who cannot say where they are going, anything that might oblige him to leave his post. A visit that respects those things gives him nothing to mind.