Airport Inn Gatwick

The Airport Inn Gatwick is a large budget airport hotel at the Longbridge roundabout (London Road, RH6 area), on the edge of Horley and Crawley near Gatwick Airport. It is part of Britannia Hotels, the chain controlled by the Langsam family, which has become one of the most prominent providers of hotel rooms to the Home Office's asylum system — with several Britannia properties across the country block-booked for asylum accommodation. Crawley and the surrounding area have been among the larger asylum-hotel locations in the South East.

UnHerd's August 2024 investigation into the Langsam family's asylum-hotel business explicitly named this site, reporting parking “outside the Airport Inn near Gatwick, another Langsam hotel that has also been used to accommodate asylum applicants”^[1]Press. The Home Office has not published a list naming this hotel, and the accommodation provider, the number of residents and the start and end dates of any contract are not confirmed in public sources. We therefore describe the site as reported asylum accommodation rather than an officially confirmed contingency hotel.

No site-specific cost figure has been published, so the following is an illustrative benchmark only. At the £170 per person per night Migration Observatory figure^[2], a roughly 120-room hotel at full asylum occupancy would imply order-of-magnitude exposure of about £20,000 per night. The May 2025 NAO contract review put the average per-hotel run rate across the portfolio at about £5.84 million per year^[3]NAO.