Company for the hours before a flight, and for the trip itself

The three hour minimum, and why it exists

Anything at Heathrow or Hatton Cross starts at three hours and £700, with the journey counted inside the booking rather than charged on top of it. Nobody on this line is going to dress that up. It is close to an hour out on the Piccadilly line and close to an hour back, so a shorter booking at the terminals would be mostly travelling, for her and for you.

Inside that three hours the travel is already absorbed. There is no separate line for it, no surcharge for the hour of the night and nothing added to the figure after you have agreed to it.

Layovers and late arrivals

The two terminal hotels joined to their halls by a covered walkway are the reason this works at all. From clearing arrivals at Terminal 5 to sitting down with somebody is about a quarter of an hour, and at Terminal 4 it is three minutes from the station without stepping outdoors. No taxi, no weather, no queue at a rank at midnight.

Send the flight number rather than the landing time you were quoted, because those two part company regularly. If the aircraft is late you send a message and the evening moves. Nobody here has ever held a delay against a guest and nobody ever will.

The Bath Road, which is a different night

The long row of hotels on the north edge of the runway is a car journey rather than a walkway, and it is a different sort of evening for it. Bigger rooms, bars with windows, one of them with a glass roofed garden in the middle of the building and palm trees under it, which is a genuinely strange thing to find four minutes from a perimeter fence.

Between four and seven that road stops moving, so a late start is not a preference out there, it is advice. Nine o'clock is a clear run and ten is better.

The aircraft themselves stop being a factor faster than guests expect. Nothing moves after eleven at night and very little before six, and the rooms on that side are built for people sleeping rather than people passing through.

Travelling together

A companion who comes with you is a different arrangement and it is always written down first. Dates, where you are going, how many days, what the daytime looks like and where she sleeps, all settled in advance and quoted as one total before you commit to anything. Weekends and anything longer are quoted on request rather than taken from the ladder.

Practicalities are yours: tickets, rooms and anything either of you books along the way. What is on the ladder is her time and her company, which is the only thing this site has ever sold.

What Iris needs from you

For an airport evening: the flight number, the hotel and the room number once you have it. That is the whole of the check and it happens once. If you would rather meet in a lobby or a bar than have her come to a door, say so, because at these hotels that is the ordinary way of doing it.

For a trip, write further ahead than feels necessary. A week is comfortable. Anything inside forty eight hours narrows the field considerably, because the women who take travel bookings are the ones whose diaries were already spoken for.

A layover is easier. Send the two flight numbers and the gap between them and Iris will tell you honestly whether the hours are enough to be worth anybody's while, which occasionally they are not.

Four who work the terminals

Lucy meets long haul arrivals at Terminal 5 and is very good at the first ten minutes, which is the part that counts after nine hours in the air. Liana is at Terminal 4 and prefers your flight number to your guess at a landing time. Margo takes the Bath Road from ten at night and knows the hotels apart in the dark. Sonya is back on the eighth of October and is four minutes from the central terminals. The full list is on On The Route.