It sounds like it spoils the surprise. In practice it is the difference between flowers in somebody's hands and flowers back in our van.
Every delivery we make starts with a phone call, and customers ordering for the first time often ask us not to make it. Here is why we do it anyway.
Malé is a city of flats above shops, with no lift in most buildings, no numbers on many doors and a good number of households where the person is out during the day. A van arriving at a building with an arrangement and no answer is not a small problem. Flowers cannot be left on a step in this heat, cannot be pushed through a door and should not be handed to a stranger.
The call takes fifteen seconds and we have become quite good at making it without giving anything away. We ask whether somebody will be at home this morning because we have a delivery for the building. That is all. If the order is a surprise, tell us at checkout and we will be careful with the wording.
The second reason is the one people do not think of. A phone call is how we find out that the person has moved, that the building name has changed, or that the flat is on the fourth floor of a building whose entrance is actually on the lane behind. Every one of those has happened, and every one of them would otherwise have been discovered by a man standing in the street with an arrangement in his arms.
For sympathy orders the call is not optional and it is a different conversation. We ask the family when is suitable and whether flowers are wanted. Sometimes the answer is later, sometimes it is a different day, and once or twice it has been no. That is a better outcome than arriving at a house full of people at the wrong hour.
If we cannot reach anybody at all, we still come. The flowers go back to the shop and into water and we try again the same evening or the next morning, at no extra cost. Nothing is left at a door.