London City airport chauffeur transfers

Getting out of the Royal Docks is easy. Getting across the Lea and into the City or the West End is the part that varies. The A13 and the Limehouse Link move well outside the peaks and badly inside them, and the Blackwall approaches can turn a fifteen-minute drive into forty.

For a morning arrival heading to a meeting in the City we will often take a different line than the obvious one, and we will say so in the quotation rather than discovering it on the day. Canary Wharf, by contrast, is close enough that almost nothing goes wrong.

A great many London City arrivals are people flying in for a single day of meetings and out again that evening. The airport exists for that pattern and the ground work should match it: collected at the door, in the car within minutes, and at a desk in Canary Wharf or the City before the hour is up.

For those days the car often stays with you. An as-directed booking through the morning removes the gap between meetings that a taxi rank creates, and the same chauffeur takes you back to the terminal for the evening departure.

Because check-in and security at London City are quick, passengers get used to leaving late and mostly get away with it. The risk is not the terminal, it is the road. A departure that leaves the West End at half past four for a six o’clock flight is relying on the Highway behaving, and it does not always.

Our pick-up times for City departures are built around the road rather than the terminal, so they can look conservative for an airport with a reputation for speed. That is deliberate.

The first departures out of London City go early, and the docks at that hour are empty in a way the rest of London never is. Wide roads, no traffic, and a terminal that fills in twenty minutes then empties again.

It is the easiest time of day to be collected and the hardest to be up for. A chauffeur who is outside at five with the heating on and the route already settled is doing the only part of that morning anybody can make pleasant.