Hilton Gatwick: the big hotel on the South Terminal walkway

The hotel stands on airport ground beside the South Terminal at RH6 0LL, joined to it by a covered walkway. The airport's published figure is a ten-minute walk from hotel to check-in, and that is the honest number to plan around: the walkway itself is short, but it delivers you into the terminal with concourse still to cross, and bags slow everything. Either way there is no road, no weather and no transfer to time, which is the whole argument for the price.

The same geography makes arrivals painless in both directions. Land at South, and the hotel is ten minutes from the baggage hall on foot; arrive by rail, and the station is built into the same terminal, so a train from London puts you a single indoor walk from reception, covered on Gatwick Airport station. Flying from the North Terminal does not rule the Hilton out, but it adds a leg: through South to the terminal shuttle, two minutes across, then North's own concourse. Allow 15 to 20 minutes door to desk and it works; on the tightest mornings, a North-side bed works better. The South Terminal guide covers what surrounds you on this side: check-in zones, security and the food balcony.

With 826 rooms the Hilton is the biggest hotel on the airport by some distance, and it behaves like it: a long lobby, wings that reward reading the signs, and enough capacity that it rarely sells out outright even when Gatwick is heaving. Rooms run from standard doubles and twins up through executive rooms, whose main currency is lounge access, with cots, connecting rooms and accessible rooms on request. Check-in opens at 15:00 and checkout is noon.

The executive lounge is the quiet-room play: evening drinks and bites, a continental spread in the morning, and a place to work that is not a lobby armchair. Priced against a standard room plus terminal coffee it rarely pays for one traveller on one night; for two people eating and drinking before an evening flight, or anyone facing a long afternoon between checkout and departure, the arithmetic improves. The hotel also takes pets, up to two cats or dogs for a £50 non-refundable fee, which is rarer than it should be this close to a terminal.

Two venues carry the hotel. The Garden Restaurant serves the buffet breakfast and a seasonal dinner menu; Amy's Bar, off the lobby, covers drinks and lighter plates for the hours in between, with room service behind both. It is dependable hotel cooking at airport-hotel prices rather than a destination, and nobody books the Hilton for the tasting menu.

The practical intelligence is about timing. A hotel this size empties toward the same dawn departure banks, so the breakfast room is at its busiest just as the earliest flyers want to be gone; if your flight is in the first wave, weigh whether breakfast is worth the queue at all when the South Terminal's restaurants and cafes are ten minutes away and open early, airside and landside both. In the evening the logic flips: the terminal quietens, the hotel bar is the livelier room, and dinner without leaving the building is the point of staying connected to the airport in the first place.

The hotel sells secured, covered self-parking at £25 per day. Read that rate for what it is: an overnight convenience, priced so that a night before an early flight costs £25 and no thought. It is emphatically not a holiday plan, because a fortnight at £25 a day is £350 for the car alone, far more than a pre-booked official space costs for the same dates.

For a trip with a flight at the end of it, the two sensible shapes are a room here plus a separately pre-booked space in the official car parks, or a package that bundles the night with the week's parking; the airport's own booking channel pairs its walkway hotels with long stay and valet for exactly this. Whichever you price, do it when the flights are booked, because hotel rates and parking rates climb the same school-holiday curve together.

Book the Hilton when the walkway is worth money to you: a 06:00 South Terminal departure, a late arrival with a small band of exhausted children, a connection that lands after midnight, or a working day that needs a conference room within sight of a runway. British Airways flies from South, which makes this the default bed for dawn BA long-haul, and the station downstairs makes it the easiest hotel at Gatwick to reach without a car.

Its weaknesses are the flip side of its size and its captive market. Peak dates are expensive for what is functionally a very convenient business hotel, pinch points crowd at exactly the hours airport guests keep, and the ten-minute walk surprises people sold on the word connected. If the budget is the constraint, Bloc sits inside the terminal itself for less, one minute from security, in rooms a fraction of the size. If your flight leaves from North, the Sofitel does this hotel's job on that side with a shorter walk. And if you are only weighing hotels because parking looked expensive, start with the package maths above before paying rack rate for either. The full field is on the Gatwick hotel guide.