Home : Europe : United Kingdom : England : London Gatwick | Airport Code: LGW

London Airport
- Gatwick -

Lasting Impressions....

"Gatwick is a good airport to sleep at but has become too popular!" (Vas)

"The cleaning staff were also going around making lots of noise scraping stuff off the floor, with no regard for people trying to sleep. " (?)

"The only bizarre thing was the armed police who would practice commando rolling down the corridors and other 'stealth attack' tactics every few hours." (Tom)

"The police were lovely they even bought me a coffee" (Holly)

Good times

by Airpunk
My flight went from the North terminal, so I headed straight for it as soon as I arrived. Unfortunately, all good places to sleep were already occupied. This terminal has a critical lack of benches with only around 100 seats (meaning around 30 places to sleep at night) located in the arrival area in front of Costa Coffee. The departure area is dead at night with no seating opportunities and further benches are only available next to the transit train to the South Terminal, where it is usually very cold. The South Terminal is a better option for sleeping: There are many benches available on the first floor, close to the shops of Gatwick Plaza. From the escalator, keep on the left and you'll see rows of benches waiting for someone to sleep on. Unfortunately, also these get occupied soon and then you'll have to look for one of the stand-alone benches which are spread throughout the terminal. I spent the night on one close to the Virgin limousine service counter in the arrival area of Terminal South. Cleaning already went through this place, so they didn't disturb me. But from what I saw, they were respectful to every sleeping traveller. In a nutshell, Gatwick is among the better airports to spend a night in. But you have to be early to get a decent place (bench) to sleep. Try the South Terminal first, even if your flight goes from North - there are free transit trains running between the terminals at least every five minutes 24h.

For people who have been sleeping in Stansted: This airport has the typical BAA - seats (You're right - the good old blue imitation leather ones). It has fewer seats with armrests, but fewer seats at all so that you'll have to be VERY early to get a good place to sleep. Furthermore, there are not as many shops and cafes open at night as in Stansted.

Gatwick airport parking | Gatwick Hotel Parking

Hostels, Budget Hotels, B&Bs, Apartments, Campsites
– Beds from $4 – Book Now!

Not a bad place, but not great either

by captaind172
I flew in from Poland and had a flight to catch at Heathrow in the afternoon on the following day. Instead of messing around with finding a hotel, messing with travel to the hotel, and then travel to Heathrow. I chose to just sleep at Gatwick, and take the National Express bus to Heathrow sometime in the morning. I chose to do this because Gatwick came higher recommended to sleep at over Heathrow. Overall, my sleep was not too bad. There are padded benches, that were fairly comfortable. There was some construction going on until about 1:30am. Once that was done with I slept very good and woke up around 5:30. There were other sleepers there, and the non-sleepers did a good job not to make much noise for us sleepers.

Um, you may want to rethink sleeping in this place

by maidenfan
We went to London to the Iron Maiden concert 5th July and then we decided it wasn't worth it to go to London and get a hotel room, so we decided to go back to the airport and sleep there.

Thankfully we got our boarding cards so we went straight to the gates area (otherwise we would have been in troubles since there're not any seats in the check-in area, loads of guys sleeping on the floor)

So, we got there and most of the nice seats were full, but finally we found some long seats to sleep.
It was fine till 3AM or so when they turned on the AC and it was freezing, horrible we couldn't sleep at all.
Besides the cleaning stuff was running in some sort of tractor to clean the floor it was tremendously noisy so it made the situation even worse.

Airport Guide

Here is some information that we've picked out of from your reviews. Be sure to read the reviews on the next page for the most up-to-date info: