Arora Hotel Gatwick, Crawley

The Arora Hotel Gatwick is one of the largest hotels in West Sussex, with 432 bedrooms and conference space sized for airline crew rotations and corporate clients. It sits in Tilgate, on the southern edge of Crawley near Tilgate Park, alongside the K2 Crawley Leisure Centre. Crawley Borough Council records confirm it holds liaison correspondence with Home Office contractors covering the use of the hotel for asylum and refugee accommodation^[2]Council.

The Sussex Express reported that holidaymakers staying at the Arora and other Crawley hotels were unaware that rooms had been block-booked by Home Office contractors to house asylum seekers, with Clearsprings Ready Homes named as one of the operators procuring rooms across the town^[1]Press.

Sussex Live ran a 2022 profile of an Afghan mother and her seven children housed in a Crawley airport hotel for months after the fall of Kabul, illustrating the use of the cluster for both Home Office asylum dispersal and parallel Afghan resettlement contingency bookings^[3]Press.

The Crawley Borough Council FOI record confirms the council held files on Home Office and contractor liaison covering the Arora Hotel Gatwick site specifically, supporting the press accounts that part of the building was operating as de facto contingency accommodation alongside its commercial trade^[2]Council.

At the £170 per-person per-night Migration Observatory and NAO benchmark^[4][5]NAO, every 100 contingency residents at a Crawley airport hotel implies about £6.2 million of taxpayer cost per year of live use. The Arora Hotel Gatwick has not had its specific occupancy share publicly broken out, but the 432-bedroom scale of the building means even a partial allocation runs into the high single digit millions annually.