Hotel room visits at Heathrow, timed to your door

By road from the centre, three quarters of an hour is normal and an hour and a quarter is what a Friday between five and seven will do to you. After eleven the motorway empties and the same run shortens considerably. Several of the women come out by rail instead: Laura lives beside the fast train at Paddington and reaches the central terminals in about fifteen minutes, and Liana takes the Elizabeth line to Hayes and Harlington with a short car at the end of it.

If you have not landed yet, send the flight number rather than a time. A clock time guessed from seat 34A is worth nothing. A flight number lets her set off while you are still taxiing, so the knock comes after the shower rather than during it.

Airport hotels are the least curious buildings in London. Half the guests checked in after ten, nobody in the bar is local, and a visitor walking to a lift is the most ordinary thing happening on that floor. She arrives dressed for the building, says nothing to reception and goes where you have told her to go.

Meeting downstairs first is perfectly normal and costs the evening nothing. Name the bar or the corner of the lobby and she will message when she walks in. Keep the room number for the moment you are both upstairs rather than putting it in the first exchange. None of these hotels has any arrangement with this desk, and none needs one.

Three hours at £700 is the floor and it is a real evening only if the window around it is five or six hours wide. Land at nine, in the room by ten, flying again after six in the morning: that works, comfortably. A four hour connection does not, and the desk would rather lose the booking than sell you a coat going back on twenty minutes after it came off.

Longer suits this airport better than short. If the night is yours anyway, an overnight at £1,800 removes the last piece of clock watching, and that shape has its own page at overnights.

Half the flights into this place arrive later than the board first promised, so a delay is the ordinary condition here rather than a crisis. Message the desk as soon as the screen changes. With three hours of warning or more the whole evening slides or stands down at no cost, and the desk would rather move it by four hours than watch you try to be charming on no sleep.

Inside two hours, half the figure stands, and a guest who never appears owes the whole of it. There is a quarter of an hour of grace on the agreed time, which covers a slow lift and a passport queue but not a second drink in the terminal.

Nancy has been meeting flights at this airport for years and can tell you which hotels are attached to a terminal and which are merely named after one. Jasmin is the one for a one in the morning landing on the southern side. Bianka knows the northern row by its lobby carpets, and Angelika works the Terminal 5 end at one steady speed.

Beyond those four the list is long, and most of it overlaps. If height is what you are picturing, the statuesque profile is the quickest way to narrow it; if you would rather describe the evening than name a face, do that and the desk will put two names in front of you.

The amount is handed to her in person when she arrives, counted once at the door and then not mentioned again. No method is named on this site and none needs to be. The desk will ask for a real arrival time rather than an optimistic one, because her journey out is planned around it.

Fees cover her time and her company, nothing else, and that is the whole of the arrangement. Adults aged 18 and over only. How a confirmation is put together, and what the desk keeps afterwards, is written out on booking.