Hourly chauffeur hire, as directed

As directed is the trade term for a booking where the passenger sets the route on the day. You reserve the chauffeur and the car for a block of hours, and where they go inside that block is entirely yours to decide. There is no destination on the job sheet, no mileage band, and no conversation about a supplement when the third stop turns into the fifth.

The practical difference shows up when a meeting finishes early. On a point-to-point booking, an early finish means standing on a pavement waiting for a car that was told four o'clock. On an as-directed booking the car is already there, because it never went anywhere else. That single fact is why most clients move to hourly hire once their days stop being predictable.

One limit deserves stating plainly. Hourly hire is priced on time, so a day that spends most of its hours covering distance is usually better quoted as a long-distance job. If the plan is Manchester and back, say so at the enquiry and the price will be built that way instead.

This is the part of hourly hire nobody asks about and everybody notices. In central London the honest answer is that the car rarely waits directly outside. Red routes, loading bays and residents' parking make a stationary car impossible on most streets for more than a few minutes, so the chauffeur finds somewhere legal within a short drive and comes back when you call.

What we promise is a short wait rather than a scramble. Your chauffeur will name the holding spot before you walk in and will be at the door within roughly five minutes of a message. A two-hour stop goes to a car park and the ticket comes with the job. A twenty-minute stop is usually handled by circling.

Outside the cities the whole problem softens. Country hotels, business parks and racecourses have space, and the car simply sits where you left it with the chauffeur in it, which is why a rural day of the same length feels calmer than a central London one.

Plans move on the day more often than not, and an as-directed booking is built to absorb it. Give the chauffeur the new address in the car and it simply becomes the next address. Nobody rings an office, nothing is re-quoted, and the afternoon is allowed to go somewhere the morning did not expect.

Two kinds of change do need a word with the office rather than the driver. The first is a large jump in distance, an afternoon that was Kensington to Chelsea becoming Kensington to Oxford. The second is running past the end of a block into hours the same car is already promised to. Both are usually solvable, and both are far easier at two o'clock than at six.

Unusual destinations are worth flagging when you book rather than on the approach road. Private airfields, bonded warehouses, film unit bases and secure sites all keep access lists, and those lists close earlier in the day than most people expect.

On a long block the boot quietly becomes a cloakroom. Coats, a gym bag, the suit carrier for the evening, the shopping picked up at the third stop: all of it lives in the car and none of it has to be carried between appointments. An E-Class takes two large cases or the equivalent. A V-Class takes considerably more, which is why it gets booked for days with kit in them.

Things get left behind, and it is safer to assume they will be. Cars are checked between jobs and anything found is logged and held. A phone that goes down the side of a seat at eleven in the morning is usually back with its owner the same afternoon, as long as we know which car it was in.

Valuables are the exception to all of that. A car parked in a public bay is a car in a public bay, so passports, laptops and jewellery are better travelling with you than sitting in a boot for two hours in a multi-storey.

For a day built from ten-minute legs, the best car is not always the biggest one. A Mercedes E-Class fits into kerb space an S-Class cannot, and on a day spent in the side streets of Marylebone that matters rather more than rear legroom you occupy six minutes at a time.

Where the day contains one long leg, a run to a plant in the Midlands or an hour each way to a client, the larger saloons repay the difference. The S-Class and the BMW i7 sit in the same class and are quoted the same way, and the i7 is the quieter of the two once you are on a motorway.

Groups change the answer completely. Four adults with bags belong in a V-Class rather than in two saloons, and six or more belong in the luxury Sprinter, which is reserved on a longer minimum block.