Why it matters more here than anywhere else in London
Central London hotels are booked by people who have walked in off a street. Hotels round the runways are booked by people who have been folded into a seat for half a day, and the two guests want completely different things from the first hour in a room. A shower gets the flight off you. A bath gets the flight out of you: the ankles come down, the shoulders drop, and the headache that started somewhere over Greenland stops being the main event.
The trouble is that the tub has been quietly disappearing from airport hotels for fifteen years. A bath takes floor area, and floor area near an airport is sold by the room, not by the square metre. Every refurbishment on this side of London has been an argument between the designer who wants more rooms and the guest who wants somewhere to lie down in hot water, and the designer has mostly won.
Where the tubs survived, by stretch of road
The older stock on the Bath Road is the best hunting ground. These are buildings that went up when a bathroom was expected to hold a bath, and when they were refitted the plumbing stayed where it was because moving it was more expensive than keeping it. Rooms at the front tend to be the larger ones, which is where the full tubs are, and the front is also the runway side, so the trade is a bath against aircraft you can hear.
The blocks on the airport side, closer to Terminal 5, are newer and more ruthless. Standard rooms there are almost all wet rooms with a rain head and a glass panel, and a bath appears only in the higher grades. That is not a reason to avoid them, it is a reason to be specific when you book, because the same building will happily sell you a room with no tub in it and no mention of the fact.
North of the motorway, out towards the fields, the hotels were built with more land and less pressure, and the bathrooms show it. The rooms are often the biggest on this side of the airport for the money, and a full bath is common rather than exceptional. The cost is distance: you are further from the terminals, so anything timed to a flight needs a longer run at it.
Room grades, and the words that actually mean something
Hotel websites are vague about this on purpose. An en suite bathroom means nothing. A private bathroom means nothing. A bath or shower means a shower. The phrases that carry information are a separate bath and shower, a bath with an overhead shower, and a soaking tub, and the last of those is rare enough round here that it is worth paying for when it turns up.
As a rule of thumb across the whole area: standard and superior rooms are a coin toss, executive rooms are better than even, and anything called a suite almost always has a full bath. Accessible rooms usually have a level-access shower rather than a tub, which catches people out when they book one for the extra floor space.
None of this is worth guessing at. One line to the hotel before you travel settles it, and the answer arrives in writing.
The line to send, and when to send it
Ask for it as a room feature, not as a favour: a full bath in the bathroom, not a shower only, and please confirm the room type that has one. Send it when you book rather than on arrival, because on arrival the answer depends on what is left, and at eight in the morning after a night of delayed arrivals what is left is whatever nobody else wanted.
If the booking went through a company travel desk, the request has to go to the hotel separately. Corporate rates are loaded against a room grade, and a travel desk will not know or care whether that grade has a tub in it. Two minutes of your own email saves the whole thing.
How a bath changes the shape of the evening
Guests who have booked a bath tend to want the evening later than they first think. An hour in hot water is an hour, and it is not an hour you want to hurry or to skip because someone is already in the corridor. So when you write to Hester, name the hour you want your companion at the door rather than the hour you land, and leave yourself the gap.
For a long haul arrival the usual shape is a bath, then something to eat, then company, and that runs past midnight without trying. An overnight at 1,800 covers it comfortably and means nobody is watching a clock at the wrong end of the night. A three hour evening at 700 works too if you have landed in the afternoon and the bath is happening before rather than after.
The other order also works and is underrated: company first, dinner, and the bath afterwards when the room is quiet again. Molly, who is out at Colnbrook and knows the west end of the road better than anyone on the list, argues for it on the sensible ground that an evening which starts with a guest who has just got out of a hot bath at least starts with a guest who is awake.
Where a bath is the wrong thing to chase
If your flight out is before seven, forget the tub and book for the floor space instead. You will be asleep inside ninety minutes of getting in and the bathroom will be a corridor you walk through twice. The same goes for a stay of under eight hours between two flights, where the only real luxuries are a blackout curtain and a bed you are not sharing with your luggage.
And if you are here for a meeting rather than a flight, look at the hotels away from the road entirely. The bath is easier to find, the rooms are quieter, and you are not paying the premium that a building charges for being four minutes from a terminal. The full ladder is on the rates page, and the same figures apply whichever side of the motorway you end up on.
Whoever comes to you is one of the twenty eight women on this site, all of them 18 or over, and the evening is her time and her company and nothing more. Those on the slender shortlist are the ones guests most often ask for on a long haul night, for no better reason than that they photograph the way people imagine an airport evening looks.
Filed under: most of the names in this piece also sit under brunettes in the by tag.