A day of business that never leaves the airport

Why meet at the airport at all

A client flying in from Frankfurt or Dublin for one meeting does not want to see London. The centre is an hour away by the time the train has been found and the taxi has crawled from the station, and the same hour waits at the other end of the day. A meeting room at the airport turns a two day trip into a day trip, and it gives back a couple of hours of every visitor's afternoon.

The postcode tells the rest of the story. TW6 is the airport itself: the terminals and the handful of hotels inside the perimeter, TW6 2AQ among them. The big hotels on the northern side of the Bath Road carry UB3 addresses in Hayes, but from a client's point of view they are the same short ride through the same tunnel. Either way the whole day happens within a few minutes of the runway.

Choose the building by the client's terminal

Start with the flight in and the flight home. A client travelling on British Airways will usually use Terminal 5, and TW6 2GD, reached from the terminal along an enclosed walkway, has one of the larger meeting and events floors at the airport. A visitor can walk from arrivals to the boardroom without once stepping outside.

A client landing at Terminal 4 is best served by TW6 3AF on its walkway, which has conference rooms of its own. For the central terminals the choice widens to the full service hotels along the Bath Road, the runway facing one, the one with the glass roofed courtyard and the two large anonymous ones, each a short drive from the central terminals. If the visitors arrive at different terminals, the central area is the fair compromise, and the free trains between the terminal stations bring anyone who lands at the wrong end.

The desk has no dealings with any of these buildings. They appear here only because they are where clients are genuinely taken.

What to ask the hotel

Every full service hotel at the airport sells meeting space by the day or part of a day, from a boardroom for eight to a ballroom. The questions worth asking are the ones that decide how the day feels. Does the room have daylight, or is it one of the interior rooms that feel like the inside of a lift? How far is it from the lobby, so that a visitor with a case does not walk three corridors? Can lunch come to the room, and when? Can the room be kept for an extra hour if the meeting runs on?

Ask too how a visitor arriving by car or bus reaches the front door, and whether the hotel runs its own shuttle to the terminals. The answer changes from year to year, and it decides whether a client waits ten minutes or thirty at the end of the day with a flight to catch.

Planning the day backwards from the flight home

The last hour of a fly in, fly out day is the one that goes wrong, so plan from there. For a long haul departure, the client should be walking into the terminal two hours before the flight. For a short one within Europe, ninety minutes. The meeting ends half an hour before that, which is the time for goodbyes, coats and a car.

At the other end, the first hour after landing is never the hour on the ticket. A client on an early flight who lands at nine is realistically in the room by ten, and a lunch pencilled in for noon gives the morning a proper shape. The border and the belt, terminal by terminal, are timed in the first hour after landing.

One more thing to settle before the invitations go out. A visitor from outside Britain passes through the border like anyone else landing here, so the electronic travel authorisation or the visa has to be in order before the first flight. A client who has never flown into the country before is the one most likely to discover this at the gate of the outbound aircraft, which is too late for a meeting at eleven.

Whoever stays behind

At six o'clock the visitors are airside and one person is left in the hotel: the organiser, the account lead, the engineer four weeks into a posting who hosted the day and is staying on until Friday. That person has been talking since breakfast and has nothing planned but a room and a television.

This is where the desk comes in, in one of two shapes. The first is a client table, a companion who joins a dinner with the visitors who are staying the night, composed and well read enough to talk to anyone without pretending to be anything she is not. The second is simpler: an evening for the host alone, from three hours at £700 to the dinner line at £900, with the day's conversation either picked over or never mentioned again, as he prefers.

Names for a working evening

Three of the seven on the late twenties list are especially good at the end of a working day out here. Danielle works Monday to Thursday in Hayes and remembers the names of people she will never meet, which a host three weeks into a project appreciates more than he expects to. Michelle is genuinely curious about how other people's work fits together and asks the second question rather than the polite one. Liana comes out to Harlington on the Elizabeth line and is not rattled by a meeting that overruns by two hours.

Send the desk the hotel, the date and whether the evening is a table for several or an evening for one. Figures for each length of evening sit on rates; the sequence of a booking sits on booking.