The Heathrow perimeter, TW6: which hotel actually serves your terminal

The glass-fronted house at TW6 2GD is the only one joined to a terminal by a walkway rather than a road. It sits at Terminal 5 and the crossing takes roughly five minutes under cover, which in January is worth more than any amount of marble.

The largest of the Terminal 5 houses carries a Terminal 5 name and an SL3 0FF postcode, because it stands on Poyle Road at Colnbrook, over the Berkshire line. Five minutes by road on a good evening, twenty when the Poyle roundabout seizes up. The mid-size hotel inside the central area, between Terminals 2 and 3, is the opposite case: it really is in the central area, and guests at Terminal 2 walk to it.

On the Bath Road itself, the house at TW6 2AQ stands behind a screen of trees with its back to the northern runway, and a few hundred metres east the four-star at the Hayes end has the longest bar on the strip and a lobby big enough to lose an hour in. Both are ten minutes by road from Terminals 2 and 3 and longer out to Terminal 5.

None of these hotels has any arrangement with this desk and none is asked for one. She arrives as your guest, walks to the lift and that is the whole of the transaction with the building.

Heathrow Terminal 5, Heathrow Terminals 2 and 3 and Heathrow Terminal 4 all have their own station, each about five minutes on foot from its concourse. The first two are served by the Piccadilly line, the Elizabeth line and the fast train to Paddington. Terminal 4 has the Piccadilly line and the Elizabeth line only, and the Piccadilly reaches it on a loop that adds a quarter of an hour nobody expects.

In practice the women rarely arrive by train at the terminal you are flying from. They come to a hotel, not a gate, and most of the perimeter hotels are a short ride from the nearest station rather than a walk. Hester quotes the door to door time, which is the only number that changes your evening.

Every companion on this site lives in central London. Pimlico, Covent Garden, Chelsea: fifty minutes to an hour each way, longer if the M4 has an opinion. A short booking at Heathrow would mean two hours of travelling for one hour of company, which is a bad evening for her and a rushed one for you.

So bookings on this side of London open at three hours, £700, and her travel sits inside that figure rather than being added on afterwards. It is not a surcharge dressed up as a rule. It is the honest shape of the journey.

Crew on a long layover who have slept and now have eleven hours to fill. Engineers in for a week of nights at a maintenance base, staying on the Bath Road because it is five minutes from work. Guests in transit with a fourteen hour gap and no visa to leave the airport zone properly. And a steady number of people flying out at dawn who would rather spend the evening before it in company than watching a departure board from a bed.

Three hours and the four hour dinner length are what TW6 picks most often. Overnights happen too, usually when the flight is at a civilised hour and the guest has worked out that ten hours of company costs less than four separate evenings would.

Lucy has opinions about every lobby on the perimeter and is usually right about which bar shuts early. Nancy knows which rooms behind the screen of trees on the Bath Road face the runway and which face the car park, and she books accordingly. Stacy prefers Terminal 4 and the covered walkway to the tower there, because the south side of the airport empties out after nine in a way the rest of it never does.

Any of the others will come to TW6 at the same rate. Look through the hall and choose on the person, then tell Hester the hotel.

North of the fence the hotels line up along the Bath Road strip, which is where most of this site's evenings happen. West, past the reservoir, Terminal 5 and its two hotels sit almost in Berkshire. In the middle of it all, the central terminals hold the only hotel here you can genuinely walk to. And if you want the whole picture across the London airports rather than just this one, the hotel comparison sets them side by side.