Executive travel, timed to the door rather than the diary

Chauffeurs on our jobs are briefed to be at the address ahead of the booked time, and to be there quietly. That means parked, engine off, out of the way of the hotel entrance or the office doors, with the phone number already sent to the passenger the evening before. It is a small discipline that removes most of the anxiety from a morning.

Being early is not the same as being visible. A car sitting directly outside a building for twenty minutes attracts a doorman, a traffic warden or both, so the chauffeur holds slightly away and steps forward as you come out. On a repeat booking they will already know which of the two entrances you actually use and which one the security desk watches.

Time buffers are built into the quotation rather than borrowed from the drive. Adding twelve minutes at the front of a journey is cheap and nobody notices it. Making them up on the road afterwards is not possible in a city, and it is where the driving gets worse, the lane changes get sharper and the journey stops being pleasant for anybody in the back.

A working day that starts in Birmingham and finishes in Manchester, or takes in Bristol and Cardiff between breakfast and the evening, is straightforward by road and awkward by almost any other means. One chauffeur, one car, and the bags stay in the boot between stops instead of being carried in and out of stations. The car is the only thing that does not change.

Distance changes the arithmetic rather than the service. Long days are quoted as a block with the mileage understood, and the chauffeur’s own hours are planned properly, because a driver who has been at the wheel since five in the morning should not be starting a three-hour run home at nine at night. Where a day genuinely needs two chauffeurs, we say so and price it.

Coverage runs the length of the country and the standard does not thin out with distance. An arrival at a business park outside Aberdeen gets the same car, the same brief and the same early arrival as a collection from a Mayfair address on a Tuesday morning. Geography changes the drive time and nothing else about how the booking is run.

Repetition is where a chauffeur service gets genuinely good. The second time someone drives you, they know the gate code, which entrance the security desk actually watches, that you prefer the front nearside window down, and that your Thursday meeting always overruns by a quarter of an hour. None of that can be written into a first booking. It has to be learned.

Where a client asks for a named chauffeur we hold to it as far as the diary allows, and we say so honestly when we cannot. Availability is a real constraint on any operator, and pretending otherwise leads to a substitution nobody was told about, which is a good deal worse than the substitution itself. A name on a confirmation is a promise or it is nothing.

When a different chauffeur does take the job, the notes travel with it. Entrances, preferences, the small things that took three journeys to learn: all of it sits on the booking rather than in one person’s head, so the fourth journey does not start from zero and nothing has to be spelled out again. Explaining yourself twice is the thing clients quietly resent most.

A quotation for an executive day names the vehicle, the start time and address, the basis of charge and the total. The cabin is the largest single lever on that total — the E-Class at the bottom, the S-Class or BMW i7 a rung up, the Jet Class conversion of the V-Class higher again — and most as-directed bookings are taken from a stated minimum block. Your written quotation confirms the final price, what it includes and any applicable tax.

Where a day is genuinely unusual, the quotation says how the unusual part is handled. An overnight stay for the chauffeur on a two-day job, a 04:00 start, a run that ends three hundred miles from where it began: each of those has a cost, and it is better on the paperwork than in a conversation afterwards that starts with somebody saying they had assumed otherwise.

Published rates for every vehicle sit on the pricing page, and they do not change because a client is new or because the request came in at four o’clock on a Friday. The figure you are quoted for a Tuesday is the figure for a Tuesday, and it is written down so that neither of us has to rely on remembering it.