Couples who book one evening together

Company for an evening. Conversation, a table or a room, a few unhurried hours with a third person who is easy to be around. The fee is for her time and her company and that is the whole of it. Nothing beyond company is offered by this desk, arranged by it, or implied by the fact that there are two of you rather than one.

Every companion here sets her own terms and may decline any booking without giving a reason. Nobody is talked into an evening, and nothing agreed in advance obliges anyone to anything once the evening is underway.

A town rather than a terminal, usually. Hounslow has a high street that is still busy at ten and restaurants that will seat three without blinking, and it is fifteen minutes from the gates on the Piccadilly line. A dinner out followed by a long second half at the hotel is the shape most couples ask for.

Inside the perimeter it works too, and the airport hotels are as indifferent to three people walking to a lift as they are to one. What the row does not give you is anywhere to go, so the evening has to be built indoors from the start.

Slower than a single booking. The first hour is three people getting comfortable rather than two, and a companion who is good at this takes the temperature and does not push the evening anywhere. Sonya is direct and unhurried and very good at the last hour, when nobody is performing any more.

The best of these evenings feel like a dinner with a friend you have known for a while. The worst are the ones where somebody decided the pace in advance and everyone else was expected to keep up, which is precisely what the conversation beforehand is for.

It helps to give the evening something to do. A table, a walk, a reason to be somewhere for the first hour, so that three people are not sitting in a hotel room at eight o'clock waiting for the evening to start itself. After that it looks after itself, and the second half is usually the part everybody remembers.

Michelle is warm, very hard to embarrass, and the reason a good share of TW3 evenings end up on the high street rather than in a hotel restaurant. Nora is cheerful and dry and steady with a table of three. Thea is settled and unhurried and used to evenings that start late.

Laura is comfortable with a group and equally comfortable when it goes quiet. Between them and the rest of the late twenties profile there is a reasonable list. The desk will name two rather than send you the whole line-up.

A day or two, because the conversation beforehand is half the booking and it cannot be done in six minutes at nine at night. Three hours is the floor at the airport as it is everywhere else here, and longer suits this format better than most, since the first hour is spent getting three people comfortable rather than two.

Either of you can stand the evening down beforehand under the ordinary terms on booking, and nobody at this desk will ask why. A couple who change their minds twenty four hours out is a perfectly ordinary thing and is treated as one. If what you actually want is two companions for a social evening rather than one, read two companions instead.