Airport transfer Heathrow to Central London with big luggages

I find the resources lacking for first timers transferring from Heathrow to Central London.

I've heard that safety is an issue with tourist spots in Europe.. which is something I'm not used to, compared to developed Asian countries like Korea or Japan where you can mistakenly leave your phone in a train station and come back to it hours later untouched or in a lost and found.

What are our options?

Here's the criteria I came up with:

• safety is priority
• no to sketchy companies
• no to overpriced services
• convenience, given that we have lots of luggages
• i don't care about speed

We are 2 people carrying 2 big luggages and 2 small luggages, btw.

Next, we get some benchmarks.

Uber is what I'm used to so let's check that + public transportation for the lowest price range possible.

So now, we are looking at a price range of £12.8 - £55 per pax.

I scoured the internet for some anecdotal references, mostly from Trip Advisor and Reddit and a lot of people say to take a pre-booked cab.

Why?

• they're courteous
• they'll wait for you patiently at the arrival
• most of all, your luggages will be accounted for unlike Uber where you don't know what kind of car you'll get

Booking a pre-booked cab

So I went to Google to do a quick search, and got bombarded with different search results every time I enter a different keyword.

So many options, which ones to book?

I clicked on so many, and the site airporttaxis-uk (also known as Onward Travel) had the cheapest rates at £147 for a round trip already, £36 per person for our 4 luggages.

My goal was just to beat Uber's price of £55, so that was cheap.

I was ready to book.

But £147 is a quite a some of money so I thought of doing a quick search for reviews and I found its company page on trip advisor ~ tons of 1-star reviews!?

Dodged a bullet right there!

I went on to check the other companies' reviews and most of the ones on the ads are scammish so you really have got to be careful.

Too many options, too many scams..

The number one cab company that keeps on showing up from Reddit users is Addison Lee, but according to some recent posts, after pandemic, it's not as good as it used to be.

Their Trip Advisor page confirms this with their page having only 2 stars!

Price Comparison of the Top 5 Cab Companies from Trip Advisor

To save some time, you can also just head directly to Trip Advisor's list of Taxi companies in London, and pick out the top of the lists.

The top 5 are the following and here are the one-way prices for my journey from Heathrow to Central London:

1. Airports Taxi Transfers - £84.62
2. Patrick Egwu Transportation - £80
3. Airport Pick Ups London - £101 (£83 if up to 3 luggages, but we have 4)
4. BlackBerry Cars - £90
5. Cheetah Cars - £87 (only £79 if up to 2 luggages)

Lo and behold, the top rating is also the cheapest in the list for us.

Price Comparison of the Recommended Cab Companies from Reddit (filtered)

I'm quite thorough with price searches so I'm curious if the recommendations from Reddit will be cheaper.

So I took a few just for price reference as well, I've removed those with not enough or bad reviews. Unfortunately, not much are left after I did the "good reviews filter":

1. Umbrella Transfers - £86
2. Wheely (app) - needed to download to get a price
3. 24/7 Airport Transfer - £94

So the same as the top ones from Trip Advisor, the range for getting a pre-booked cab is really £80-90 one-way.

TL;DR

To summarize, here are the options for getting from Heathrow to London, in order of preference:

1. Booking a pre-booked cab
2. Booking Uber
3. Elizabeth line / Heathrow express + taxi
4. Black cabs are expensive, have limited luggage and people space

If you have small luggages, best to take the train for speed, you'll skip the London traffic and get to your destination 2-3x faster.

Lowest price is £12.8 per person if you commute, and around £80-100 if you ride a cab.