Cheap airport transfers
Heathrow Terminal 4 taxi transfers, booked before you land, with one figure agreed in writing and a driver sent against your flight number. Terminal 4 is the one terminal where none of the usual Heathrow collection arrangements apply: the multi-storey car park has gone, parking has moved to a Park & Ride zone with a shuttle, and the only lane at the building is charged by the minute.
Vehicles
The seats are rarely the number that settles this.
Luggage picks the vehicle at this terminal more reliably than the head count does. Four passengers fit a saloon; four passengers with four twenty-three-kilo cases do not, and at Terminal 4 that is discovered at a shuttle stop rather than at a kerb.
What follows are the network’s published capacities, the same at every airport it works at because the vehicles are the same. What is particular here is who is arriving: a great deal of what lands at Terminal 4 has come from the Gulf, from south Asia or from the Far East, and parties off those flights travel heavy.
| Class | Passengers | Luggage | Booked for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Saloon | Up to 4 | 3 large (3 passengers), or 2 large and 2 hand bags (4 passengers) | Two passengers off a Gulf or European flight with a case each. The commonest booking here, and the one that comes unstuck when a fourth suitcase appears at the shuttle stop. |
| Estate car | Up to 4 | 3 large and 3 hand bags | The same four places over a far longer boot, which is what a party books when the case count has grown and the head count has not. |
| Executive car | Up to 3 | 2 large and 2 hand bags | Three seats and a quiet hour, for the arrival that is due at a meeting rather than at a hotel. |
| MPV, 5-seater | Up to 5 | Up to 4 large suitcases | A party of five kept together rather than split between two cars at the kerb. |
| MPV, 6-seater | Up to 6 | 4 to 5 large suitcases | Six seats over a boot deep enough for a month away, or for a pushchair that has to lie flat rather than ride on a knee. |
| Executive 7-seater | Up to 7 | Up to 7 bags | Seven for a drive counted in hours, with nothing in anybody’s lap at the end of it. |
| Executive MPV | Up to 7 | Up to 7 bags | The same seven seats to a higher specification, usually for guests arriving rather than a family going home. |
| Van, 8-seater | Up to 8 | Up to 7 bags | The largest party still treated as one car. Past eight it becomes a group movement and is arranged as one. |
| 8-seater minibus | Up to 8 | 6 to 8 large suitcases | The same eight places with more room behind them, booked when there are more suitcases in the party than there are people. |
A saloon carries four people with three large cases, or two large and two hand bags once the fourth seat is taken. An estate keeps the seats and lengthens the boot, which is the right answer when the bags have grown and the party has not.
A Heathrow Terminal 4 executive taxi seats three rather than four, and buys a quieter cabin for the hour between the arrivals hall and wherever somebody is waiting. It is the class most often booked for an arriving guest rather than by the person travelling.
A Heathrow Terminal 4 MPV takes five or six and the pushchair that will not fold. It is the class that suits the long-haul arrivals this terminal specialises in, where the cases outnumber the passengers before anybody has counted.
Above the MPV come the Heathrow Terminal 4 7-seater taxi, in either trim, and then the van. A Heathrow Terminal 4 8-seater taxi is as large as a single car booking gets; beyond it a party is a group movement, arranged as a single journey rather than as several that hope to leave together.
A Heathrow Terminal 4 minibus is the answer for sixteen people with sixteen cases, none of whom wants to stand at a shuttle stop while a second vehicle is found. Thirty seats exist above that. Both are quoted on exactly what a saloon is quoted on: the address, the hour and a bag count somebody has genuinely counted.
A class is not priced on its own here; the vehicle is one input into the figure for a journey. Whether a given class can be supplied on a given date is answered by the booking rather than by a column in a table.
Reviews
Pulled in from the platforms that hold them.
Everything in the panel below was written by passengers on review platforms, and those platforms serve it. None of it was composed, chosen or reordered at this end.
There is no score for one terminal and none has been invented. What loads covers the network as a whole, written by whoever felt moved to write and wherever they happened to be.
At a glance
The answers first, with the detail behind each one further down.
A Heathrow Terminal 4 taxi booked here is one private car for your party, quoted before you travel and timed against your flight. Where it waits for you is the part that differs from every other terminal at this airport.
Each line is taken up again further down, where whoever published it is named. What came from the airport is credited to the airport; what is ours is marked as ours.
| The question | The answer |
|---|---|
| Airport and terminal | London Heathrow Airport (LHR), Terminal 4 |
| Airlines here | Thirty-two, Qatar Airways, Etihad Airways, Air France, KLM, Malaysia Airlines and Korean Air among them |
| Where you meet the driver | By WHSmith, ground floor of Arrivals — the one point the airport names for this terminal |
| Where the car can be | The charged Priority Pick-Up lane outside arrivals, or Park & Ride Zone A with its shuttle |
| The multi-storey car park | Closed, with all passenger parking moved to Zone A |
| How the fare is set | Worked out from your own journey, shown before you book, and unchanged afterwards |
| Flight watching | On every arrival, against the flight number on the booking |
| Free waiting after landing | 60 minutes from touchdown; 90 if the hold-up is the belt |
| Where the journeys go | Anywhere in London, any address in the country, and the five other London airports |
| Vehicles | From a saloon up to a coach, decided by the bags before the head count |
| Booking | Online at any hour, subject to availability |
A Heathrow T4 taxi, a Heathrow Terminal 4 airport transfer, a Heathrow Terminal 4 minicab and a Heathrow Terminal 4 taxi service all name the same arrangement. What genuinely has two meanings here is the collection itself, and the pick-up section takes it apart.
Two sorts of money are kept apart throughout what follows: what Heathrow charges a vehicle, which is published above with Heathrow named, and what a transfer costs, which is quoted to you.
Booking
Eight answers, and what each of them changes.
Can I pre-book a Heathrow Terminal 4 taxi? That is the only way to have a named driver waiting rather than a queue to join. A Heathrow Terminal 4 taxi booking asks eight things, and six of them change which vehicle is sent.
One form covers both directions. A taxi from Heathrow Terminal 4 is tied to a flight and waits for it; a taxi to Heathrow Terminal 4 is tied to a desk and has to beat it.
Send the flight number, the date, the destination in full and a realistic count of the bags. The flight is then followed, and the arrangement for meeting you is written into the confirmation rather than improvised in the hall. At airport arrivals your driver waits at the agreed meeting point with a name board and helps with the bags.
A Heathrow Terminal 4 private transfer is yours alone. Nobody else is collected on the way out of the airport, no stranger’s hotel is called at, and nobody sits in the vehicle waiting for a flight that is not theirs.
A pre-booked Heathrow Terminal 4 taxi works the same way in reverse. The car comes to wherever you are — a house, a hotel, an office, any address the booking supports — and leaves you at the Terminal 4 departures road. On anything over a couple of hours, be generous with the margin between arriving and the gate closing, because that margin is the only part of the day nobody driving can influence.
How a drive of several hours to a departure is planned is covered under long-distance transfers. Pick-ups that begin before the first train of the day have a page of their own, and they matter more at this terminal than at the others, for the simple reason that no Night Tube calls here.
The figure follows the vehicle, the distance, the hour and anything added to the booking: a second address, a child seat, a bulky item, extra waiting. It is calculated from what you describe, which is why half an address produces a figure that has to be revisited. A Heathrow Terminal 4 fixed-price taxi means that figure holds once you confirm it — not that one number covers every journey.
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Filling in the form does not commit you to anything. The figure is produced once the address, the vehicle and the flight are known, and you see it before you agree to it.
Pick-up
One meeting point, two collection arrangements, and no third option.
Where do taxis pick up at Heathrow Terminal 4? In one of two places, and which one decides how the rest of your arrival goes. A car can take the charged Priority Pick-Up lane outside arrivals, or it can park in Park & Ride Zone A and come in on the shuttle.
This is the part of Terminal 4 that catches people out, and it catches them out because the terminal has changed. Everything in this section dates from after the day the Heathrow Terminal 4 car park closed, which is why older instructions do not describe it. The Terminal 4 multi-storey car park, which used to take both terminal parking and the airport’s own Meet & Greet valet service, has closed as part of a redevelopment of the terminal. All Terminal 4 passenger parking has moved to Zone A of the Park & Ride, zones B to D remain, for pre-booked parking only. Heathrow’s own Meet & Greet valet parking is not available at this terminal while the work goes on. Heathrow says the terminal itself stays open throughout the works, and describes a new car park, a rebuilt drop-off area and modernised facilities as what the work is for.
Heathrow publishes one meeting point for Terminal 4, next to WHSmith on the ground floor of Arrivals. That is the Heathrow Terminal 4 driver meeting point and the Heathrow Terminal 4 arrivals meeting area in one: a single named shop on a single floor, which makes it the easiest of the four terminals to describe to somebody who has just landed. Come through into the public hall, find the shop, and wait where a person holding a board can see you.
A Priority Pick-Up area outside the arrivals hall takes quick collections, and it is the only place at this terminal where a car may stop at the building at all. It is reached along Salisbury Road: from the Terminal 4 roundabout, Heathrow’s instruction is to stay in the two right-hand lanes and follow the road to the marked area. It is charged by the minute. Heathrow is explicit that vehicles should not be left unattended in it.
That last rule is the one that shapes everything else. A driver who stays with the car cannot walk into the building; a driver who walks into the building cannot have left the car in that lane. The two cannot both be true at once, whatever a page promising kerbside meet and greet at this terminal implies.
Free pick-ups are from Zone A of the Park & Ride car park, which Heathrow calls the best option for meeting people in the terminal. The first two hours there cost nothing, which is a great deal more room than the twenty-nine minutes the same car parks give at the other terminals. Free shuttle buses run between Zone A and the terminal every five minutes, from four in the morning until half past eleven at night, calling at stops five, six and seven outside the arrivals hall. How long that ride takes depends which Heathrow page you read: one says as little as six minutes and its own list of questions says about ten.
It depends on the arrangement your booking carries, and the honest answer is that the two are different services wearing one name. If the driver is to meet you by WHSmith with a board, the car is in Zone A and the pair of you take the shuttle back to it. If the arrangement is kerbside, the driver is in the Priority Pick-Up lane with the engine running and you come out to the car. Its own advice is that anybody who wants to come inside the terminal should park in Zone A rather than use the pick-up lane.
Can a taxi pick me up outside Terminal 4? In the Priority Pick-Up lane, yes, and nowhere else at the building: collecting a passenger from a terminal forecourt drop-off area is not allowed at any Heathrow terminal. A Heathrow Terminal 4 private hire pickup therefore happens in one of exactly two places, and both of them are described above.
Which means the Heathrow Terminal 4 taxi pickup point is really a pair of them: one where you stand and one where the car is. A Heathrow Terminal 4 arrivals pickup that goes smoothly is simply one where both halves were agreed in advance instead of being worked out by telephone in a crowded hall.
What meet and greet can honestly promise, and what it cannot, is set out in its own notes. For the other three buildings at this airport, where the arrangements are nothing like these, see the Heathrow pick-up guide.
The airport charges for the place a car waits, and the amount depends on which of the two options the booking uses. Your quotation is where to check how it has been handled.
Delays
What happens to the booking when the aircraft is late.
Every arrival booked here is watched against the flight number you gave, so a late landing moves the collection rather than losing it. The free waiting then runs from the moment the wheels touch down, not from the time printed on your ticket.
A Terminal 4 arrival has more between the aircraft and the hall than a short-haul one does, which is the practical reason the allowance is counted this way. Immigration at the end of a nine-hour flight is not a figure anybody can forecast from outside the building.
Long-haul schedules shift by hours rather than by minutes, and a Terminal 4 service can be put back to the following morning. Send the new flight number as soon as you have it: the booking is rewritten against it instead of being cancelled and remade.
If you are landed at a different airport altogether, say so immediately. A transfer from Gatwick or Stansted is a different journey at a different figure, and it is better arranged while you are still on the aircraft than at a carousel.
Our notes on what trips first-time arrivals up set out the mechanics in full, and the terms and conditions carry the waiting rates that apply once the free allowance has gone.
Waiting past the free allowance is charged at the rate in the terms your confirmation links to, rather than at one quoted in a sentence here.
Airlines
Thirty-two carriers, each one read on its own airport page.
Which airlines use Terminal 4? Thirty-two of them, and between them they make this the most long-haul of the four terminals. Qatar Airways, Etihad Airways, Air France, KLM, Malaysia Airlines and Korean Air all operate here.
The Heathrow Terminal 4 airlines are set out below by the part of the world they fly in from. Heathrow gives each airline a page of its own and names the terminal on it. Every carrier below was read there rather than copied from a list, which is the only way such a list stays right: airlines move between terminals, and they move without warning the pages that reproduce them.
| Where they fly from | Carriers | Airlines |
|---|---|---|
| The Middle East | 7 | Etihad Airways, Gulf Air, Kuwait Airways, Oman Air, Qatar Airways, Riyadh Air, Saudia |
| Europe and the Mediterranean | 6 | Air France, Air Serbia, Bulgaria Air, KLM - Royal Dutch Airlines, KM Malta Airlines, Vueling |
| Asia and central Asia | 12 | Air Astana, Azerbaijan Airlines, Biman Bangladesh Airlines, China Eastern, China Southern, Korean Air, Malaysia Airlines, Pakistan International Airlines, Royal Brunei Airlines, Uzbekistan Airways, Vietnam Airlines, Xiamen Airlines |
| Africa, the Americas and beyond | 7 | Air Algerie, El Al, Kenya Airways, Royal Air Maroc, RwandAir, Tunisair, WestJet |
A Qatar Airways Terminal 4 taxi and an Air France Terminal 4 taxi are the same arrangement on the same form. So is a KLM Terminal 4 airport transfer, a Malaysia Airlines Terminal 4 taxi or a PIA Heathrow Terminal 4 taxi. What the airline does change is what comes off the aircraft: an Etihad Heathrow Terminal 4 pickup at six in the morning usually means more cases than a short-haul arrival at noon, and the cases decide the vehicle.
Four groupings, and three of them are long-haul. The Middle East carriers and the Asian ones land parties with a case each; the European handful — Air France, KLM, Vueling, Air Serbia, Bulgaria Air and KM Malta Airlines — land people with cabin bags. The same arrivals hall therefore produces two completely different vehicle requirements within an hour of each other, which is why the vehicle section puts luggage ahead of seats.
An airline can be moved between terminals with a few weeks’ notice, and a booking naming the wrong number sends a car to the wrong building on an airport where the buildings are miles apart. The number on your own boarding pass is the one to trust; Heathrow’s airline pages are where to confirm it if the pass is not to hand yet.
Fares
Where the number comes from, and why none is printed.
How much is a taxi from Heathrow Terminal 4? There is no single answer, because the figure is produced from your journey rather than read off a list. The address, the vehicle, the hour and anything added to the booking all go into it, and you see the result before you commit to anything.
A Heathrow Terminal 4 taxi fare to a hotel beside the airport and one to a village in Northumberland share a booking form and nothing else. Publishing a from-price for either would be publishing a number chosen to look low, and it is not a number anybody could stand behind at the point of paying.
The Heathrow Terminal 4 taxi cost therefore follows the journey rather than the terminal. A Heathrow Terminal 4 private transfer price is built from the inputs in the table below, and a Heathrow Terminal 4 to London taxi fare is built from exactly the same ones — a different address, not a different scheme.
| The input | What it changes |
|---|---|
| The full destination address | The distance and the route, which is most of the figure |
| The vehicle class | Chosen on the luggage as often as on the head count |
| The hour and the date | A pick-up before the trains run is not costed as a midday one |
| Flight watching | Included on every arrival booking, and never charged as an extra |
| Extra stops | A second address is a second leg and is priced as one |
| Child seats | Available on request and free of charge |
| Bulky or unusual items | Golf bags, instruments and skis change the vehicle, and the vehicle changes the figure |
| Waiting beyond the free allowance | At the rate in the terms, which the confirmation links to |
A Heathrow Terminal 4 fixed-price taxi means the figure you accept is the figure that stands. It does not climb because the M4 was slow, because the carousel took an hour or because the driver sat in Zone A waiting for a flight that landed late. What does change it is a change you make: another address, another passenger, a different vehicle, waiting you have asked for beyond the allowance.
That is the whole of the difference between this and a meter. A metered fare is a number nobody knows until the journey ends; a quoted one is a number you both agreed to before it began. The comparison below puts the two side by side.
An affordable Heathrow Terminal 4 taxi is one booked on honest details. Three cases described as two means the wrong car arrives and a second journey has to be arranged; a postcode without a house number means a driver circling a street. The least expensive booking is nearly always the accurate one rather than the lowest figure quoted somewhere.
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There is no table of journey prices on this whole page. The same form books a hotel ten minutes away and a house four hundred miles off, and the two figures have nothing in common.
Airport charges
Heathrow’s own amounts, reproduced as Heathrow published them.
Three separate Heathrow charges touch a Terminal 4 transfer: the Priority Pick-Up lane, Park & Ride Zone A and the drop-off at departures. Not one of them is ours, and every figure below belongs to the airport that set it.
They are printed here because a passenger comparing arrangements cannot otherwise see why a collection at this terminal is organised the way it is. Heathrow may raise any of them on any day it chooses, and what is in force on the day is what Heathrow’s own pages say that day.
Ten minutes in the Priority Pick-Up area costs £7 and an hour in it costs £25, with £200 the most a single day can come to. The lane is reached along Salisbury Road, and the ladder below is the airport’s.
| Time in the pick-up area | Charge |
|---|---|
| Up to 10 minutes | £7.00 |
| 11 to 29 minutes | £14.00 |
| 30 to 60 minutes | £25.00 |
| Each further hour, or part of one | £25.00 |
| The most it can cost in a day | £200.00 |
Payment is by card only, taken online, through an automated telephone line or by Autopay, and it cannot be made at a ticket machine or in the pick-up area itself. A visit paid for afterwards is due by midnight the following day.
Two hours in Zone A cost nothing at all, and the fourth hour takes the whole visit to £9.40. This is the option Heathrow itself recommends to anybody meeting a passenger inside the building, and the free opening is the reason why: a Heathrow Terminal 4 free pickup exists here and nowhere else at this terminal.
| Time in Zone A | Charge |
|---|---|
| Up to 2 hours | Free |
| 2 to 4 hours | £9.40 |
| 4 to 24 hours | £46.80 |
| Each further day, or part of one | £37.40 |
Two free hours at Zone A is particular to this terminal. The equivalent car parks at Terminals 2, 3 and 5 allow twenty-nine minutes, so instructions written for those terminals understate what is available here by well over an hour.
Heathrow charges £7 every time a vehicle enters one of its terminal drop-off areas. Terminal 4’s drop-off is reached by Stratford Road and opens into three lanes. It applies at every hour of every day of the year, and a second visit is charged as a second visit, and at this terminal Heathrow states specifically that the charge cannot be paid at the zone.
Neither list names a taxi or a private hire car, so the vehicle that sets you down at departures pays what any other vehicle pays. That is worth knowing before reading any page that implies a private hire car slips past it.
Taken together, those three ladders are the whole of the Heathrow Terminal 4 parking charges a collection can run into, and the Heathrow Terminal 4 Priority Pick-Up cost is the one that moves fastest, because it is counted by the minute. What used to be a choice of several car parks is now, for Heathrow T4 airport pickup parking, Zone A and that lane and nothing else.
They are the airport’s charges on a vehicle, levied on the driver at the barrier. How any of them is reflected in what you pay is set out in your own quotation, which is the document to read rather than a paragraph here — ours is the only figure on this subject we are entitled to describe, and your confirmation is where it is written.
Every amount in this section was set by Heathrow and is Heathrow’s to change. What is reproduced is what it had published; what a driver actually pays is what is in force on the day.
Black cab
Two different arrangements, and the honest case for each.
A black cab from the Terminal 4 rank is taken on the spot and metered; a pre-booked private car is arranged in advance and quoted. Both are licensed and both are legitimate, and they suit different arrivals.
The airport’s own description of them is worth having first. Every terminal has a rank where London’s black taxis queue. Heathrow notes of their drivers that they have passed the Knowledge of London examination, and of the cabs that each one can carry a wheelchair, and it publishes no fare of its own for them and points at Transport for London’s fare information instead.
| What differs | Black cab from the rank | Pre-booked private car |
|---|---|---|
| Arranged | On arrival, by joining the queue | Before you fly, online |
| The fare | Counted on the meter as you go | Quoted and agreed before the journey |
| Known in advance | No, by the nature of a meter | Yes, on the confirmation |
| Flight watching | Not applicable — nobody is expecting you | Part of every arrival booking |
| Where you meet it | At the rank outside the terminal | By WHSmith, or at the pick-up lane, as your booking states |
| Name board | No | Yes, held by the driver at the meeting point |
| Choosing the vehicle | Whatever is at the head of the queue | Chosen on your luggage and party size |
| Very large parties | Divided between several cabs | One minibus or coach on one booking |
| Long runs out of London | Possible, at a metered figure | Quoted as a single arranged journey |
| Wheelchair access | Every London black taxi takes one, Heathrow states | On request, confirmed before the booking is taken |
If you have landed with hand luggage, you are going a short distance and the queue is short, the rank is quick and nothing here says otherwise. It asks nothing of you in advance, which on an unplanned arrival is the whole of its appeal.
When the flight is long-haul and might land late — which at this terminal is most of them. When there are five of you and nine cases. When somebody is being met rather than meeting themselves. When the destination is Oxford rather than Kensington. When somebody else is paying and wants the figure before the journey instead of after it.
Our page on how a black cab, a minicab and an app compare in London takes the same argument further, out past the taxi rank altogether.
One fare is counted on the road, the other is agreed before the road, and neither is published in advance by anybody. That is the whole of the difference between them.
Rail
The railway from this terminal, with the gap it leaves.
Terminal 4 has the Elizabeth line and the Piccadilly line, and it does not have Heathrow Express. That one absence is the thing to know before planning an arrival here around a train.
Terminal 4 has four Elizabeth line trains an hour, running through central London and Canary Wharf to Abbey Wood. That is fewer than the six an hour at Terminals 2 and 3 and twice the two an hour at Terminal 5. Heathrow Express does not call here. Its own pages name Terminals 2 & 3 and Terminal 5, so reaching it from this terminal means getting to the other station first.
| Service | Where it goes | How long it takes | Published fare |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elizabeth line | Central London, Canary Wharf and on to Abbey Wood | Under forty-five minutes, four trains an hour from this terminal | £13.90 to zone 1 |
| Piccadilly line | Central London, calling everywhere | Under the hour, with no Night Tube at this terminal | From £5.50 |
| Heathrow Express | London Paddington, non-stop from Terminals 2 & 3 | Fifteen minutes once you are at that station, which is not this one | From £10.00 booked ahead |
| Coach | Victoria coach station, and towns beyond London | No journey time published | From £10 |
The Underground station for this terminal is below Terminal 4 Arrivals, and Piccadilly line trains stop at every Heathrow terminal, but the Night Tube does not serve Terminal 4. Put the two together and the shape of the problem appears: the Piccadilly line does stop here, below Arrivals, but the Night Tube does not — which matters to anybody landing after midnight.
A single traveller with one bag going to Canary Wharf is being well served by four Elizabeth line trains an hour, and no honest page pretends otherwise. The case for a car is strongest exactly where the railway is weakest: luggage, late hours, groups, and addresses the railway does not reach.
Rail fares and frequencies above are the operators’ own, reported as published. Anything time-sensitive is worth checking with the operator on the day.
For comparison, here is what the airport itself says about driving the same journey. Allow an hour at the very least for the drive into central London: that is the airport’s own advice, and it says the figure moves with both the destination and the time of day.
The railway’s own numbers appear here for one purpose only: so that a reader can weigh the train against the car. They are the operators’ figures, set and changed by the operators.
Across the UK
Fourteen parts of the country, and what each one asks of the booking.
A Heathrow Terminal 4 taxi is not only a London booking: the same car will take you to Oxford, Southampton, Manchester or Edinburgh. What changes with the distance is how much of the arrangement has to be settled in advance.
Terminal 4 lands a great many people who are not stopping in London. A flight in from the Gulf or from south Asia frequently ends at a university, a hospital, a works or a family house hundreds of miles north, and the last leg is a drive whatever else is tried first.
Door to door, not platform to platform. Westminster, Kensington, Chelsea, Mayfair, Victoria, Marylebone, Soho, the City and everywhere between them. Heathrow asks drivers to allow an hour at least; what decides whether the hour was enough is the last half-mile, the one-way system and whether the hotel has anywhere to stop.
The station without the station. Paddington, Bayswater, Marylebone and Westminster. The irony of this one is that the train everybody associates with Paddington does not call at this terminal at all, which is why the road is a straighter answer here than it is from Terminals 2 and 3.
The long way across. The Isle of Dogs, the Docklands, Stratford and Canary Wharf itself. Four trains an hour reach them from here, so what makes a car the better answer is cases, children, or a door the railway leaves you well short of.
The short run west. Windsor, Slough, Datchet, Eton, Maidenhead and Ascot. Fifteen minutes of motorway on a good day, and the booking most often made for somebody who has been awake for a very long time.
Name the building, not the institution. Colleges one by one, the hospitals, the station, the centre and the villages outside the ring road. There is no single address that means “the university”, so a driver needs the one you actually want.
The clock decides this one. Colleges, hotels, the science and business parks and the towns around them. The road crosses the top of London, so an afternoon departure and a late-afternoon one are different journeys over the same miles.
Up the M40. Houses, hotels, campuses and the exhibition halls, in Coventry, Solihull, Wolverhampton and Warwick as much as in Birmingham itself. Two quite different bookings use this road: the executive arrival and the family one, and they want opposite vehicles.
Westbound, and long enough to plan. Bristol, Bath, Chippenham, Swindon and the towns in between. Far enough that the luggage picks the class and the departure hour picks the journey.
Worked backwards from the gangway. Berths, port hotels and the Hampshire towns behind them. Give us the vessel, which berth it is on and the latest hour you may board, and everything else about the booking follows from those three.
Around the southern side. The coast from Poole and Bournemouth across to Worthing, Hove, Brighton and Eastbourne. Almost all of it is the M25, which is also where almost all of the lost time happens.
Four hours at best. The north-west: Preston and Warrington, Chester, Liverpool and Manchester. Once a drive is this long the class is picked for the seat rather than for the boot.
North, and planned around the clock. Wards, lecture halls, offices and front doors, from Leicester and Nottingham up through Sheffield, Leeds and York to Newcastle. The hour this one sets off decides more about it than the route does.
Over the Severn. Newport first, then Cardiff, Swansea and the towns up the valleys. On a run of this length the time spent sitting counts for as much in choosing a vehicle as the luggage does.
Arranged, not read off a chart. Glasgow, Edinburgh and the places on the way to both. At this distance the breaks and the hours a driver may legally work stop being details and become the plan, which is why nothing about it is quoted from a chart.
Two of those cards cover more than one city: a Heathrow Terminal 4 to Bath taxi is quoted alongside Bristol because the road is the same as far as the Severn, and a Heathrow Terminal 4 to Bournemouth taxi alongside Brighton because both run around the southern side of London rather than through it.
The notes on how a long-distance transfer is arranged go through the rest, and what a long UK run involves covers the runs that do not touch an airport at either end.
Mileage alone does not price a drive of this length. It is quoted as one arranged movement, with what the figure covers written down before you accept it.
Airport to airport
The five other London airports, and the change nobody wants to make.
Landing at Terminal 4 and flying out of Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, London City or Southend is one booked journey rather than a rail puzzle with the cases in tow. The driver waits at this terminal and sets you down at the next airport’s departures.
Terminal 4’s own rail position makes this the terminal where an airport-to-airport car earns its place most clearly: no Heathrow Express here, and a connection between airports by train almost always means crossing central London with everything you own.
Name the terminal. North and South are a shuttle ride apart, and being set down at the wrong one costs whatever the drive was meant to save. This is the journey between airports that gets booked more than any other.
Send the check-in time. Done in one vehicle, where the railway would want a change of train in the middle of it and a concourse walked with everything you own.
Expect a second charge. Up the western side of the orbital motorway. Luton levies its own fee on vehicles reaching the terminal, set by that airport and nothing to do with Heathrow’s.
The hour decides it. This one crosses London instead of going round, so when it leaves matters a great deal more than how far it goes.
Allow for the distance. The furthest of the five, out beyond the eastern edge of the city, and the one worth starting earliest.
An airport-to-airport transfer is timed against the second airport’s check-in rather than against the mileage. Give us the onward flight number and the desk time; the pick-up is then set from them, with the orbital motorway’s worst hours taken into account rather than hoped away.
Our notes on the Heathrow to Gatwick run sets out how these are planned, and the UK airport transfers page covers the airports themselves.
Two airports are two addresses, and the figure between them is worked out the way it would be for any other pair, with the hour of the day inside it.
Families
The arrival this terminal produces more than any other.
A family off a long-haul flight at Terminal 4 is the booking this terminal makes most, and the vehicle is decided by the luggage rather than by the number of seats. Four people with four large cases are not a saloon booking, whatever the seat count says.
Add the pushchair that does not fold, the car seat, the duty-free and the bag somebody bought at the airport, and the party that booked a saloon is standing at a shuttle stop at six in the morning rearranging itself. Counting the bags honestly at the booking stage is the whole trick.
A Heathrow Terminal 4 family transfer is therefore quoted on the bags first and the seats second, which is the reverse of how most people describe their own party.
Seats are available on request and free of charge. Say how many you need and the ages of the children, because a baby carrier, a toddler seat and a booster are three different fittings and the right one has to travel with the car rather than be found at the airport.
| The party | Usually the right class |
|---|---|
| Two adults, one child and three cases | Estate, booked for the boot and not for the seat |
| Two adults, two children, four cases, one pushchair | Six-seat MPV |
| Two adults, three children, five or six cases | Seven-seat vehicle |
| Two families travelling together | Eight-seat van, or two vehicles if the luggage says so |
| A party arriving together on one flight | Sixteen-seat minicoach |
| A group too large to divide between cars | Thirty-seat coach |
The WHSmith meeting point is inside the building, which with tired children is the difference between a collection and an ordeal. Where your booking places the driver therefore matters: inside with a board, or outside at the lane. The pick-up section explains which is which, and it is worth reading before a family arrival in particular.
Our notes on family transfers and the guidance on group bookings carry the rest.
No figure appears anywhere in this section. What a family pays follows from the vehicle its luggage actually requires, so the vehicle is settled before anything else is.
Business
What a corporate arrival needs that an ordinary one does not.
A Heathrow Terminal 4 executive taxi is booked when an arrival has somewhere to be, and when somebody other than the passenger is organising it. The flight is watched, the vehicle is quiet, and the figure is known before the journey rather than after.
Terminal 4’s carrier list makes this a business arrival in its own right. A great deal of what lands here comes from the Gulf and from the Far East, and the people getting off have been in a cabin for ten hours before the first meeting of the day.
Give us the passenger’s name and mobile number as well as your own. The confirmation then reaches the person who will be standing in Arrivals rather than the person who arranged it from an office, which is the one detail most often got wrong on an assistant’s booking.
An arriving delegation is better handled as one vehicle than as three cars that hope to leave together. Send the flight, the head count and the bag count and the class follows from them; above eight it becomes a corporate arrangement rather than a single booking.
Roadshows and multi-stop days are covered on the business-class transfers page, and an arrival that has to be at a conference the same morning is usually booked alongside the hotel transfer it feeds.
Invoicing, consolidated billing and anything else a company settles about how it pays belongs in the agreement between us, and not in a paragraph written for everybody.
Accessibility
What can be arranged here, and what has to be arranged with the airline.
An accessible vehicle is arranged on request and confirmed before the booking is taken, so that nobody arrives to find the wrong car. Assistance inside the terminal is a separate matter and is booked through your airline.
Heathrow’s instruction for airport assistance is to ask your airline, travel agent or tour operator at least forty-eight hours before you fly. That is the airport’s instruction and not ours to alter: the people who meet an aircraft and take a passenger through the building work for the airport and its airlines, and a transfer booking cannot summon them.
A Heathrow Terminal 4 wheelchair accessible taxi is therefore confirmed before the booking is taken rather than hoped for on the day, and what follows is what settles it.
The WHSmith meeting point on the ground floor of Arrivals is the point Heathrow publishes, and it is the arrangement that suits a passenger who would rather be met inside than walk out to a lane. That arrangement puts the car in Zone A with the shuttle; the pick-up section sets out what each option involves so the right one can be asked for.
The accessible vehicles guide carries what we can confirm about vehicles in advance.
Nothing is quoted for an accessible vehicle until it is known that one can be supplied on the day. That answer comes first and the figure comes after it.
Going back
The leg back, counted from a desk rather than from a landing.
A taxi to Heathrow Terminal 4 is planned backwards: from the hour the desk closes, through the drive, to the pick-up at your door. It is the opposite calculation to the arrival, and it is the one with less room in it.
An arrival has a cushion — the free waiting absorbs a late landing. A departure has none: the aircraft leaves whether or not the road behaved. So the figure worth being generous with on this leg is the gap between arriving at Terminal 4 and the gate closing.
Book both legs together if you can. The return is then on file before you fly, which matters most when you land back at two in the morning and the Night Tube does not call here.
Terminal 4 departures are reached by Stratford Road, and Heathrow charges £7 for the entry into the drop-off area whatever the vehicle. The arrangement for that is in your quotation rather than in a sentence here.
Tell us the flight number for the departure as well as the arrival. A desk time is the one thing a driver cannot estimate from a destination.
Work from the airline’s own instruction for your flight: long-haul desks at this terminal close earlier than a short-haul traveller expects, and most of what flies from Terminal 4 is long-haul. Add what the road wants at the hour you are travelling, and then add the margin you would want if the road were wrong.
A pick-up before the trains run is the commonest reason a Terminal 4 departure becomes a car booking at all. The guidance on late-night and early-morning transfers covers how those are arranged, and the booking is taken online at any hour, subject to availability.
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A departure is costed from the address it starts at, the desk it has to reach and the hour it has to leave — those three, and nothing about the terminal itself.
About us
What we are, and what we are not.
We are a booking platform. Your transfer is carried out by a licensed private hire driver. Every class is clean, modern and driven by a professional, licensed driver. Your confirmation shows the driver and vehicle details.
Nothing written above claims a presence inside Terminal 4 that nobody has. We do not run a desk in the arrivals hall, we do not own the lane outside it, and we have no influence over what Heathrow charges a vehicle for stopping there.
Heathrow’s charges, meeting points, car parks and shuttle are Heathrow’s, and every one of them appears above credited to Heathrow, because the airport can change any of them without telling anybody who reproduces them. Rail fares and frequencies belong to the operators that publish them. Immigration queues belong to nobody at all.
This terminal is one stop on a network that also covers Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and airports across the United Kingdom. How collections work at the rest of this airport is in the Heathrow pick-up guide, the about us page sets out how the booking platform works. Anything you want in writing before you book is on the terms and conditions.
Every amount above belongs to somebody else and says so, and each one can be read at its own source. Ours is the single figure your confirmation carries.
Questions
Eighteen questions, answered in the first sentence of each.
Every answer below opens with the answer itself. What follows it is the reason, and where the fact belongs to Heathrow the answer says so.
In one of two places. A car may wait in the charged Priority Pick-Up area outside arrivals, reached along Salisbury Road, or it may park in Park & Ride Zone A and the driver comes in on the free shuttle. Nothing may wait anywhere else at the building, and the forecourt drop-off may not be used for collections at any Heathrow terminal.
Next to WHSmith on the ground floor of Arrivals. That is the single point Heathrow publishes for this terminal, which makes it the simplest of the four to describe to somebody who has just landed. Whether your own driver meets you there or waits at the pick-up lane is stated on your confirmation.
It is a charged area outside the arrivals hall and the only place at this terminal where a car may stop at the building. Heathrow’s published charges start at £7.00 for up to ten minutes and reach £25.00 for an hour, with each further hour another £25 and £200 the most a single day can come to. Payment is by card only and cannot be made in the area itself.
The multi-storey car park has closed as part of a redevelopment of the terminal, and all passenger parking has moved to Zone A of the Park & Ride. Heathrow’s own Meet & Greet valet parking is unavailable here while the work goes on. The terminal itself stays open throughout.
The first two hours cost nothing, two to four hours are £9.40 and up to twenty-four hours are £46.80, with £37.40 for each further day. Those two free hours are particular to this terminal: the equivalent car parks at Terminals 2, 3 and 5 allow twenty-nine minutes.
Heathrow’s own pages disagree. One reports as little as six minutes and its list of questions reports about ten. The buses are free and run every five minutes from four in the morning until half past eleven at night, calling at stops five, six and seven outside the arrivals hall.
It depends on the journey, and no page can honestly answer it with one number. The quotation is produced from the destination address, the vehicle class, the hour and anything added to the booking, and you see it before you confirm. Once confirmed, that figure stands.
The city is not the unit the figure is built from; the address is. Mayfair, the Isle of Dogs and a hotel beside the perimeter road are three unlike journeys with one name on them. For the time it takes, the airport itself says to allow an hour as a minimum and warns that the number moves with the destination and the hour.
Only from Park & Ride Zone A, where the first two hours cost nothing. The Priority Pick-Up area outside arrivals is charged from the first minute, starting at £7.00 for up to ten minutes, and a car may not be left unattended in it at all.
Thirty-two, among them Qatar Airways, Etihad Airways, Air France, KLM, Malaysia Airlines, Korean Air, Saudia and Pakistan International Airlines. Most of them are long-haul, which is what gives this terminal its particular mix of heavily laden arrivals.
Yes, and it is the only way to have a named driver expecting you rather than a queue to join. The booking takes the flight number, the full destination address, the date, the party size and an honest bag count; the flight is then watched and the free waiting runs from touchdown.
Sixty minutes from touchdown on an arrival transfer, and ninety when the hold-up is at the baggage belt. The clock starts when the aircraft lands rather than at the time printed on the ticket, which is the point of giving us the flight number.
No. Heathrow Express calls at Terminals 2 & 3 and Terminal 5, so reaching it from here means getting to that station first. Terminal 4 does have four Elizabeth line trains an hour and the Piccadilly line, though the Night Tube does not serve this terminal.
Yes. Heathrow states that London’s black taxis wait at the ranks outside each terminal, that their drivers have passed the Knowledge of London examination and that every one of them takes a wheelchair. It publishes no fare of its own for them and points at Transport for London instead. A rank cab is metered and unbooked; a pre-booked car is quoted and expected.
Heathrow charges £7 every time a vehicle enters a terminal drop-off area, at every hour of every day. Terminal 4’s is reached by Stratford Road and opens into three lanes, and at this terminal Heathrow states specifically that the charge cannot be paid at the zone. Setting somebody down at a Park & Ride car park is free.
Yes, from a six-seat MPV up to a thirty-seat coach, and the class is chosen on the luggage rather than on the seats. Four passengers with four large cases need more than a saloon, which at this terminal is discovered at a shuttle stop if it was not settled at the booking.
Yes. Oxford, Cambridge, Birmingham, Bristol, Southampton, Manchester, Leeds, Cardiff and Scotland are all booked as single arranged journeys, quoted on the full address, the hour and the party. A great many Terminal 4 arrivals are not stopping in London at all.
They are available on request and free of charge. Say how many and give the children’s ages, because a baby carrier, a toddler seat and a booster are three different fittings and the right one has to travel with the car.
An amount Heathrow sets may be raised whenever Heathrow decides to raise it, and no page that reproduces it is told beforehand.
The flight number, the full address at the far end, the party and the bags as they will really be when they come off the belt. From those comes one vehicle at one quoted figure, with the flight followed from the number you gave and the collection named in writing — WHSmith or the pick-up lane — so that nobody lands at this terminal wondering which of the two it is going to be.