Heathrow Terminal 5, TW6 and SL3: the walkway hotel and the Poyle Road pair

The TW6 2GD address is the hotel at the end of the covered walkway. Five minutes at a normal pace, indoors the whole way, with a glass atrium and a long bar at the end of it. In January that covered five minutes is the entire argument for the building, and in a delay it is the difference between an evening and a wait.

It is also the one Terminal 5 address where nobody needs a car at any point. For a guest on an early departure that matters more than the room does.

The SL3 0FF house, the biggest of the three, is on Poyle Road at Colnbrook: five minutes by road on a clear run, twenty when the Poyle roundabout seizes. The lanes of the old village start where the car park ends, which is an odd and rather good thing to find behind a terminal hotel.

The third stands on the Bath Road at Longford, twenty minutes from the terminal on foot or five by road. Three hotels, three different postcodes, one name. Hester works from the hotel you name rather than the terminal on your ticket, for exactly this reason, and none of the three is connected to the desk in any way.

Terminal 5 evenings divide neatly into two kinds. If you have just landed, the first half hour is deliberately slow: a drink, a seat away from the doors, dinner later than you would expect, and the evening builds from there. If you are flying at dawn, the whole thing reverses. Early start, early dinner, a quiet last hour and an end that leaves you a real night.

For a flight before seven, the honest advice is a longer booking that finishes early rather than a short one that finishes late. It is the difference between arriving somewhere rested and arriving somewhere having had three hours of sleep and a bad idea.

Long haul out of Terminal 5 is the bulk of it: guests with a twelve hour flight in the morning who would rather spend the evening before it in company. Crew on a night between rotations. Business travellers who have learned that the walkway hotel beats an hour on the M4 in either direction.

Three hours is the floor and the four hour dinner length is common. Overnights are more frequent here than anywhere else on this site, because a ten hour booking that ends with coffee before a mid morning flight is a sensible way to spend a night at an airport.

Danielle has crossed that walkway in every kind of weather Middlesex produces and plans the evening around your flight rather than around dinner. Samanta takes the Poyle Road side, explains the Berkshire business to anyone who asks, and is one of the few women here who will tell you outright that you should sleep.

Everyone in the hall will come to Terminal 5 at the same rate. Send Hester the hour your flight leaves and she will say what actually fits.

East along the perimeter are the central terminals, ten minutes by road or one stop on the train, and Terminal 4 further south on its own loop. North of the fence, Longford is the nearest village and the Bath Road begins just beyond it. West over the motorway, Colnbrook holds most of the rooms that carry this terminal's name.