Airport hotels, terminal by terminal, with the drive times stated plainly

A walkway hotel means you never go outside and never book a car. At Heathrow there are two: the glass-atrium house at TW6 2GD, about five minutes under cover from Terminal 5, and the tower at TW6 3AF, roughly four minutes along an enclosed walkway from Terminal 4.

A drive hotel means five to fifteen minutes on a road that is usually fine and occasionally is not. The TW6 2AQ house on the Bath Road, set back behind its trees, is ten minutes from Terminals 2 and 3 and about fifteen from Terminal 5. Anything on Poyle Road, Stockley Road or Cherry Lane belongs in the same group.

An expedition is anything the name implies but the map denies. Those are the bookings that go wrong, and Hester's first question is always the hotel rather than the terminal because of them.

Terminal 5: one walkway hotel, one Berkshire address on Poyle Road five minutes away, one on the Bath Road at Longford. Terminals 2 and 3: one hotel in the central area you can walk to, and the Bath Road row ten minutes north. Terminal 4: the walkway hotel on the south side, in the quietest corner of the airport after nine at night.

Across all of them the pattern holds. The nearer the building is to a gate, the less there is to do in it. The further out, the more the evening has to be built from scratch, which several of the women prefer.

Gatwick has two hotels people ask about: the one at the North Terminal, RH6 0PH, and the one at the South, RH6 0LL. Both are joined to their terminals and both are a long way from here. From central London it is an hour or so by road on a good evening and considerably more on a bad one, which is why a Gatwick night is a different proposition from a Heathrow one and priced by the same ladder but planned with far more margin.

East of the city, the hotel at Royal Victoria Dock, E16 1AL, serves London City airport and the exhibition centre. It is a city hotel with an airport nearby rather than an airport hotel, and it behaves like one.

This desk is honest about the range it covers well. The roads around Heathrow are what it knows. Ask about anything further and you will get the real drive time rather than a yes.

The women live in central London. Even the shortest journey out to a perimeter hotel is the better part of an hour each way, and at six in the evening it is more. A one hour booking at an airport would mean two hours in a car for sixty minutes of company.

So three hours, £700, is the floor at every airport on this page, with her travel inside the figure rather than added to it. Nothing is charged for the journey separately and nothing is charged for the hour of the night.

Luna likes the rooms far enough out to feel like a night off rather than a connection, and she is very good in a bar that fills up at nine with people who have given up on their own kitchens. Violetta is unsentimental about the whole category: some of these hotels are handsome and some are a bed beside a motorway, and she will turn either into a proper evening.

Everyone in the hall works the Heathrow hotels. Name yours to Hester and she will say how much of the night it wants.

For the ring road hotel by hotel, the Heathrow perimeter. For the walkway and the Poyle Road pair, Terminal 5. For the central area and the free buses, Terminals 2 and 3. For the long row of frontages north of the fence, the Bath Road, and for the Berkshire cluster behind it, Colnbrook.