Travelling on from here, with somebody in the next seat

Dates, route and the length of the booking, settled in the chat with Hester before anything is bought. Your own arrangements stay yours: you hold the tickets and the rooms, and the desk will tell you what she needs rather than book anything on your behalf.

Nobody here will ever ask for a document, a bank detail or a passport scan. What the desk needs is a date, a destination and a length, and nothing else at all.

Almost every trip from here starts with a night near a gate, and it is worth doing properly. A room at one of the airport hotels far enough out to feel like a night off makes a better beginning than a dawn taxi from town. The desk will often suggest folding that night into the booking rather than treating it as a separate evening.

At Harmondsworth and the villages around it the hotels are ten minutes from Terminal 5 and almost silent after dark, which is the best argument for staying there the night before a long flight.

Lightly, and without drama. She dresses like any other passenger, she does not expect to be entertained in a departure lounge, and she is entirely capable of spending four hours in the air without needing the conversation kept alive. Several of these women read properly and will finish a book on a long sector.

Once you land she works the same way she works here: she asks what the trip is for and then listens to the answer. A long journey with the wrong company is worse than a long journey alone, and every one of the four names below has been chosen for this booking because she is easy to sit beside for six hours without either of you having to fill the silence.

Her time comes off the published figures, three hours at £700 through to £1,800 for a full night, and a multi day trip is priced as a run of those rungs. Travel, rooms and meals are yours and are agreed before departure so that nothing is a surprise at the far end.

Once a figure is agreed it does not move. Her fee for each booked day is handed to her in person, exactly as it is on an ordinary evening here.

Not everybody does, and the desk will not pretend otherwise. Karolina is the steadiest traveller on the roster, comfortable with silence and unbothered by a delay. Vanessa takes short notice better than most and is twenty five minutes from Paddington when a trip comes together quickly.

Stacy keeps to the southern perimeter and the quiet terminal and is used to early departures. Luna does not do brief, which makes a long trip suit her better than an evening. Everybody else is in the hall; the statuesque tag holds three of these four if that matters to you.

As far ahead as you can. A trip is a run of days out of a diary rather than one evening, and the women who travel hold those days rather than juggling them. Send Hester the dates, the destination and the rough shape of the trip, and she will say plainly who is free and who is not. The booking page covers the rest.