An overnight built around a departure, not around a late night

Tell Hester the departure time before anything else. Everything else is worked back from it: when dinner starts, how late the evening runs, when the lights go off. A guest on a dawn departure and a guest with a lunchtime flight want two entirely different nights out of the same ten hours, and the desk would rather know which you are having than guess.

For an early start the women here keep the evening deliberately calm. Three good hours ending at eleven is better than a late night regretted at four, and every one of them will say so rather than sell you the other version.

Terminal 5 is the easiest address anywhere on this side of London. The hotel at the end of the covered walkway is five minutes from the gate in any weather, which turns a dawn departure from an ordeal into a short stroll with a coffee in hand.

At Longford the argument is different. Four streets and a stream, twenty minutes on foot from Terminal 5 or five by road, and a quiet after midnight that feels impossible a mile from a runway. Guests who sleep badly at airports tend to sleep there.

Dinner, the long middle of the evening, the night, and the morning. Nobody is watching a clock at either end. She arrives dressed for the building, the fee passes to her by hand in the first minute, and after that the time is simply the time.

What is being booked is her company for those ten hours. That is the same at ten hours as it is at three, and nothing further is offered or implied at any length.

The part guests underrate. Breakfast at an airport hotel starts absurdly early and is usually better than the dinner was. She will keep an eye on your morning without once mentioning it the night before, and she is entirely capable of getting a tired guest out of a room and towards a departures door on time.

Several of these women have walked guests to the end of the Terminal 5 walkway. It takes five minutes and it is a better start to a flight than a taxi rank at five in the morning.

Danielle plans the whole thing around your flight rather than around dinner and is very good at reading which of the two nights you are actually having. Samanta is five minutes by road from the Terminal 5 gates and takes overnights more often than any other name on this side.

Violetta prefers a longer booking to a short one and is back in early October. Liana holds Longford and keeps an eye on your morning without mentioning it; she returns at the start of the month. Sonya is back in the middle of October and knows the village road in the dark. The rest of the roster is in the hall, and the thirties tag holds three of the names most often asked for at this length.

More notice than an ordinary evening, please. Several of the women take a small number of nights a week out here and hold them rather than juggling them, so a week ahead is comfortable and a fortnight is better if the date is fixed by a flight. The booking page sets out the exchange, and the desk will always say plainly if a night cannot be held.