Wheels down to hotel door: one honest hour, terminal by terminal

The hour nobody prints

An itinerary ends at touchdown. The evening starts at a hotel door. Between the two sits an hour that appears on no ticket and decides almost everything about the first part of the night: whether you shower before the knock or during it, whether you eat, whether you meet her downstairs composed or upstairs flustered with a shoe in your hand.

It is not a fixed hour. It depends on where the aircraft parks, which passport you carry, how many other aircraft landed in the same ten minutes and whether anything is waiting for you on a belt. Each of those can be estimated, and together they make one number the desk can plan with. What follows is how that number is built.

The eGates, and who can use them

The automatic gates at the border read the chip in a biometric passport and compare its photograph with your face. Holders of British and EU passports use them, and so do travellers from a list of other countries that includes the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. For an adult travelling alone on one of those passports, the gates turn a border that can take an hour into one that takes a few minutes.

Everyone else joins the staffed desks, and that queue is the largest single variable in the whole hour. At a quiet time it moves steadily. In the middle of an arrival wave it can hold several hundred people. The one thing that helps is having the formalities settled before you fly, the electronic travel authorisation approved or the visa already in the passport, so that nothing at the desk needs a second look.

Arrival waves, and where you sit

Long haul traffic reaches the airport in banks rather than a steady stream. The overnight flights from North America, Asia and the Gulf arrive together in the early morning, and a second, smaller crowding builds through the late afternoon and evening. Land at the front of a bank and the hall is empty. Land ten minutes behind three wide bodied aircraft and you join the back of eight hundred people.

Where you sit matters more than people expect. The first twenty rows leave the aircraft several minutes before the last, and on a long walk to the border those minutes decide your place in the queue. If the evening matters, a seat near the front is worth choosing when you book the flight rather than when you board it.

The belt

Hand luggage only is the single biggest saving on the list. A hold bag adds anything from fifteen minutes to three quarters of an hour, depending on the terminal, the airline and how quickly the aircraft is unloaded. Priority tags help a little. They help less than people hope, because the first bags off still wait for the first container to reach the hall.

If you do have a bag, go to the belt before the washroom, the currency counter or the call home. At some terminals the cases are already turning by the time the eGate queue has cleared, and a bag left circling long enough is lifted off and set aside, which costs another ten minutes finding it.

Terminal by terminal

Terminals 2 and 3 share the central area and one station. Terminal 2 has its main building and a satellite pier linked by an underground walkway, and some of Terminal 3's piers are a long walk from the border. With the eGates and no bag, forty minutes from touchdown to the kerb is fair, and an hour and a quarter is the pessimist's figure. The central area hotel is a short walk from there, and the hotels on the Bath Road are a short drive out through the tunnel, a quarter of an hour at most.

At Terminal 5, aircraft parked at the B and C satellites send their passengers back to the main building on a short underground train before the border. The hall is large and usually moves well. Allow thirty five minutes to the kerb on a good day and an hour on a bad one, then add ten to reach TW6 2GD along the covered walkway.

Terminal 4 stands alone on the southern side and takes a good share of the Gulf and Asian arrivals, so its waves can be sharp. The taxi in from the runway can be long. Forty minutes is a good day and an hour and a half a bad one, and TW6 3AF is on a walkway beside it. From Terminal 4 to anything on the Bath Road is the long way round.

Turning the estimate into a knock at the door

The desk takes that number and works forward from it. For a walkway hotel, she aims to arrive about an hour and a quarter after touchdown for a guest on the eGates with no bag, and nearer two hours for a guest with a bag and a staffed desk. For the Bath Road, add a quarter of an hour. It is always easier to wait ten minutes for a knock than to answer the door in a towel.

What makes the sum work is a flight number in place of a clock time, and a plain word about whether you carry a bag and which passport you hold. If the border turns out slower than planned, one message from the hall moves her by half an hour and nobody is put out. The mechanics of a hotel room visit are on their own page, and a night that begins at one end of the airport and ends at the other is covered in changing terminals on the free train.

Who meets which terminal

Three of the seven on the petite list take a large share of these first night calls, and between them they cover the map. Rosa works the central terminals and the perimeter hotels, often at short notice. Lea knows the Terminal 5 end and the Colnbrook side and leaves town early enough to arrive composed. Jasmin is the name for Terminal 4 and for landings after midnight, and she times her journey to the aircraft rather than the board. Every figure is on rates.