London airport transfers | U Want Taxi
Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and London City are all marketed as London airports, though only Heathrow and London City are anywhere near the city itself. From Burnham, Slough, Windsor, Maidenhead and Marlow, which one is quickest and cheapest depends on where you actually live, not the name on the departure board.
All five are sold as 'London' airports by the airlines that use them, which is useful for marketing and not very useful for working out your journey. Stansted is closer to Cambridge than to London. Luton sits to the north of the city, near the M1. Gatwick is south of London, closer to Crawley and Brighton than to central London. For anyone travelling from Burnham, Slough, Windsor, Maidenhead or Marlow, the practical question isn't which airport counts as 'London' — it's which one your flight actually leaves from.
Heathrow is the nearest by a clear margin from all five of the towns we cover. It sits just off the M4, and a saloon transfer from Burnham or Slough usually takes 15 to 25 minutes outside peak traffic. If your airline flies from more than one London airport, and Heathrow is one of the options, it's almost always the shortest and cheapest transfer from this part of Berkshire and Buckinghamshire.
Gatwick is the next most common request, mainly for airlines and package holidays that don't use Heathrow. It's a longer run — over an hour from most of our coverage area, and the fare reflects that extra distance and time. It's still a single fixed price agreed at booking, but it's worth checking whether your specific flight also has a Heathrow option before assuming Gatwick is the only choice.
Stansted and Luton both serve a lot of budget and charter flights, and both are a longer transfer from our area than Heathrow or Gatwick — expect a fare and journey time closer to a trip into central London than a short local hop. London City is the smallest of the five and mostly used for business routes into Europe; few of our customers fly from there, but we run the transfer the same way as any other airport booking.
If you're not sure which airport your ticket actually uses, check the booking confirmation rather than assuming — 'London Stansted' and 'London Luton' are both a genuine distance from London itself, and further still from Burnham or Marlow than Heathrow is. Tell us the airport and terminal when you book, and we'll quote the fixed fare and realistic journey time for that specific route, not a generic 'airport' guess.
Working out the right airport before you book matters more than it sounds. Two flights with the same departure time, on the same day, to the same holiday destination, can leave from opposite sides of London depending on the airline — and the transfer cost and journey time between those two options can differ by an hour or more. A quick check of the airport code on your ticket, before you commit to a transfer, is worth the two minutes it takes, and it means the price you're quoted matches the airport you're actually flying from.