A personal chauffeur for the household

The difference between a personal chauffeur and a well-run car service is repetition. With one regular chauffeur nobody has to explain that the gate needs holding for four seconds after the code, that the youngest gets travel sick facing backwards, or that the third turning is closed on market days.

We assign a chauffeur to an arrangement rather than to a journey, and we assign a named second at the same time. That second person shadows one or two runs early on, which is unglamorous but means the week your regular chauffeur is on leave does not feel like starting again.

None of this means the same face forever. If the fit is wrong, tell us and we will change it without any awkwardness. A personal chauffeur arrangement only works when the household is genuinely comfortable, and that is a matter of temperament as much as anything else.

Small preferences add up. The cabin at nineteen degrees rather than twenty-two. Radio off in the mornings. The rear left seat because it is the one furthest from the pavement on your side of the street. Water in the door, not the console.

A chauffeur working with the same household picks up most of this within a fortnight and we write down the rest so it survives a change of driver. The list looks trivial written out and makes a considerable difference to how a car feels at seven forty in the morning.

Some of it is practical rather than preference. Which of the two routes to the surgery has fewer speed humps matters if someone in the car is recovering from surgery, and it is the kind of thing only a regular driver ever learns.

Child seats are fitted before the car arrives, not wrestled into place at the kerb while a school bell goes. We ask for the age, weight and height of each child rather than just "a child seat", because the difference between a stage two and a high-back booster is not a detail you want discovered on the pavement.

Older children travelling alone are a category of their own. We drive unaccompanied minors on a parent's written instruction, with an agreed handover at both ends and a message to say the drop has happened. The chauffeur does not leave a school or a house until the child is inside.

Grandparents, nannies and guests travel on the same arrangement. Where somebody else is booking on your behalf, we confirm the journey back to you as well so there is never a car sent that the household did not expect.

Holidays, illness and training all happen, and an arrangement that collapses when one person is away was never an arrangement. The named second chauffeur has the same notes, has driven the route at least once, and is introduced before the week they are needed rather than on the morning.

A short written handover goes with the cover: the standing times, the access details, the preferences, and anything that has changed recently. It takes ten minutes to write and saves the household from a fortnight of instructing somebody from scratch.

If a cover week goes badly we would rather hear it plainly. The point of a personal arrangement is that it feels settled, and a cover chauffeur who does not fit is a fixable problem.