When one evening is not the shape of the booking

As a sequence, written out before you agree to it. Two nights is two nights at £1,800. A stay with three evenings and one overnight in it is three rungs and one night, added up and sent to you in a single message. Nothing is rounded, nothing is invented, and once agreed it does not move.

Her travel out from town is inside every one of those figures, as it is on a three hour evening. There is no supplement for a run of days and no separate arrangement of any kind.

Twelve hours between flights is an awkward amount of time. Too long for the terminal, too short to go into London properly, and almost always in the middle of the day. It is one of the few bookings out here that works better in daylight than after dark.

The women who take these tend to suggest something with shape to it: the villages around Colnbrook, a long lunch somewhere with a garden, an afternoon that ends with you back at a gate unhurried rather than exhausted.

Commoner than the layover and better suited to this side of London. Guests on long assignments end up in the same room for days at a time, and by the fourth evening the hotel dining room has stopped being interesting.

A run of evenings with the same companion works well here, and the desk will often suggest it: she already knows the hotel, the kitchen and the walk, and the second evening starts where the first one finished rather than at the beginning again.

Not beside a gate. Terminal 5 is unbeatable for a dawn departure and wearing for a week. For a longer stay the desk points guests at the hotels set back from the noise, the ones at junction four and along Stockley Road where the fields start at the edge of the car park.

Ask before you book the room. Hester would much rather advise on the hotel than work around a poor one for a fortnight, and she has no interest at all in talking you into the expensive answer when the quiet one is ten minutes further out and half the price of the mistake.

Violetta prefers a long evening to a short one and takes longer bookings when she returns in early October. Samanta takes more overnights than anybody else on this side. Milena books more evenings on Stockley Road than anywhere else and knows those hotels properly.

Angelika is steady over a run of nights and never arrives already watching a clock. Sonya is back in the middle of October and is the most experienced name on the western villages. The rest of the roster is in the hall, and the slim and slender tag holds four of these five.

Early, and with the dates. A run of days comes out of a diary that also holds single evenings, so the sooner the desk knows, the more likely a particular name is free for all of it. Send Hester the hotel, the dates and the rough shape, and she will write the sequence out in one message. The booking page has the exchange from there.