Escorts in Heathrow Terminals 2 and 3, TW6, from the entrance and the lift to your door

Inside the central area

The hotel inside the central area is the nearest bed to the two terminals, a modern building within walking distance of the bus station and the rail platforms. Rooms are compact and cleverly planned. It suits a short, efficient booking before an early departure, when the walk to the gate next morning is the whole point of staying there.

A companion reaches it by car through the tunnel under the northern runway, the same way the taxis come in. Once inside the airport the approach is short, but the tunnel queues at busy times, which the quoted time already allows for.

The Bath Road: a row of big houses

The Bath Road, the A4, runs along the northern perimeter with the runway on one side and a row of large hotels on the other. Two of them stand towards the Hayes end, both with wide lobbies built for conference groups: the taller of the pair, and its neighbour, which hides a glass roofed garden in the middle of the building. A third sits further west along the same row, low and long. The fourth, TW6 2AQ, is the only one of the row inside the airport fence, and some of its rooms face straight across the runway.

Each has a staffed front desk all night and a forecourt where a car can pull up at the door. For a visitor, that is the easiest kind of hotel in London to walk into. Say which Bath Road hotel it is, because the strip is long and the entrances face different ways.

The atrium hotel at Cherry Lane

One more hotel stands north of the Bath Road on Cherry Lane, beside the M4 spur, close enough to West Drayton to share its postcode. It is a practical, modern building around a big internal atrium, popular with families and with drivers leaving a car for a fortnight. Being so close to the motorway makes it one of the quicker Heathrow addresses to reach from town.

The Hoppa and the hotel shuttles

The Heathrow Hotel Hoppa buses link the terminals with the Bath Road hotels for a small fare, and a few hotels run shuttles of their own. They are fine for a guest with a suitcase and time to spare. For a companion arriving late they are no use at all: they run to a timetable and stop at each hotel kerb in turn. She comes by car, straight to the door, with the fare already in the quote.

Still at the terminal when you write? Quote the minute you will be upstairs with the key, not the minute the wheels touched down. The bus or taxi to the Bath Road adds twenty minutes or so at busy hours, and the desk plans the knock from the moment you are actually upstairs.

Getting there, day and night

From central London by car, allow a good hour after 22:00 and an hour and a half or more in the evening rush on the M4. By rail, the Heathrow Express gets to Terminals 2 and 3 roughly 15 minutes out of Paddington, and the Elizabeth line and the Piccadilly line both stop there too. Rail brings you to the terminals, not the Bath Road hotels, which are a taxi or a paid hotel bus beyond. That is why most arrivals here are planned by car, whatever the hour.

Terminal 1 has been closed since 2015, so any old directions mentioning it are out of date. If a colleague tells you to meet at T1, they mean the central area, and the hotel they have in mind is almost certainly one of the ones on this page.

Who stays on the northern side

Passengers off the late transatlantic arrivals into Terminal 3, and those on the first European departures from Terminal 2. Delegates at the big Bath Road hotels, which run their own conference floors. Travellers rebooked after a missed connection, sent here in numbers because these hotels are large. For all of them the booking follows one pattern: three or four hours, a quiet corridor, an early alarm. The Heathrow three hour briefing walks through a typical one.