Crowne Plaza Gatwick: one hotel left, and it is in Crawley

Two hotels have carried the Crowne Plaza Gatwick name, and only one still does. The current holder is Crowne Plaza London Gatwick Airport at 90 Langley Drive, Crawley, the business-district hotel this page reviews. The other, the country-house hotel and spa out at Felbridge near East Grinstead, was sold to Britannia Hotels in early 2025 and now trades as Elite Venue Selection Felbridge, also styled Felbridge Gatwick Hotel and Spa.

The distinction costs real money when it is missed. Felbridge sits about nine miles from the airport by road, roughly a 15-minute drive with no airport bus, so a booking made there on the strength of an old Crowne Plaza recommendation buys a countryside conference hotel and a taxi bill, not an airport stop. Old reviews, old maps and old loyalty-scheme expectations all still point at it; current IHG bookings and points land at Crawley. If a spa weekend near Gatwick is genuinely the plan, Felbridge remains a pleasant one, but it is no longer this brand, and it was never a convenient airport hotel.

The Crawley hotel is the business pick of the Gatwick ring, at RH11 7SX less than a mile from the Manor Royal business district and a short hop from Crawley station. Food and drink run to two venues: The Cube, the main restaurant, serving breakfast and a locally sourced dinner menu, and The Olive Grove, the bar, covering drinks and light meals through the day. Leisure means a 24-hour fitness suite and a heated outdoor terrace, and it is worth saying plainly that there is no swimming pool; the pool-and-spa memories belong to Felbridge.

The house rules are corporate-tidy: check-in from 15:00, checkout at noon, a minimum check-in age of 18, no pets, and a fully smoke-free building. Midweek the hotel fills with Manor Royal business traffic, which is exactly when its rates firm up; at weekends the conference rooms empty and the pricing often softens, the opposite rhythm to the terminal-side hotels, and occasionally the arbitrage that makes a ten-minute drive worth it.

The airport leg is a ten-minute drive up the A23, and the hotel's shuttle covers exactly half of the travelling day: it runs from 03:30 to 13:00 daily at £5 per person each way. For departures that timetable is nearly ideal, built for the dawn wave when taxis are scarce and surge-priced, and it reaches both terminals, with the South Terminal the nearer side coming up from Crawley.

Arrivals are the gap. Land at 18:00 and the shuttle stopped five hours earlier, so the return leg is a taxi, a lift, or the local buses along the corridor, and that cost belongs in the comparison from the start: a family's two taxi legs can outweigh the room-rate saving over a closer hotel. The pattern to exploit is the one the timetable was built for, drive down or taxi in the night before, sleep, and ride the £5 bus to the terminal at 04:30 while the forecourt drop-off queue pays £10 a car for the privilege.

Parking is the quiet headline. The hotel holds about 200 spaces at £12 per day, the lowest per-day hotel parking rate this site has recorded around Gatwick, undercutting the Holiday Inn's £20 and making the Hampton's £60 quote look like a misprint. For a night-before stay with a car, that number plus the morning shuttle is the whole proposition.

For a night plus a week away, the hotel sells a Park, Stay and Go package, with a stated sweetener of an upgrade to a Club room when availability allows. Price it against the field before assuming: the package comparison sets the benchmarks, from the Sofitel's walk-to voucher to Worth's keep-your-keys compound, and every parking option at Gatwick covers the parking-only alternative that a £12 day rate quietly competes with.

Book the Crowne Plaza for the dawn departure with a car, where the £12 parking and the 03:30 shuttle were designed for each other; for Manor Royal working trips, where it is effectively the house hotel; and for weekend stays when the business pricing sags below the terminal-side hotels. It is the most hotel-like hotel in the budget-to-mid ring, and travellers who find airport corridors bleak tend to prefer it.

Skip it when the schedule fights the shuttle window: evening arrivals, late departures and anyone allergic to taxi bookings should look at the three Holiday Inns, whose Povey Cross hotel runs its bus around the clock, or pay for walk-to certainty at the terminals. The full field, walkway hotels to budget strip, is at every hotel at Gatwick compared.