Booking terms

A booking exists once we have sent a confirmation and not before. An enquiry, a held quotation and a verbal agreement on the phone are all steps towards one, and none of them puts a car in a diary.

The confirmation is short on purpose. It names the vehicle class, the pick-up point, the date and time, the destination, the price and any child seat or special requirement. If any of those five lines is wrong, tell us straight away; correcting a booking is a two-minute job the day before and a serious problem at six in the morning.

Pick-up, destination, date and time will produce a number. Everything else you can tell us produces a better one.

Passenger and luggage counts decide the class of vehicle. A flight number decides when the chauffeur leaves the yard. A postcode with a building name and an entrance decides whether the car is at the right door or on the wrong side of a one-way system. We will quote without them, and then we will come back and ask.

Quotations are written. Nothing is agreed on the strength of a figure said aloud, because the point of a written quotation is that neither side is remembering it differently in a fortnight.

The validity period is set out in clause 4 of the terms and conditions. Inside that window the price does not move unless the journey does.

A quotation covers the journey described in it. Add a leg, move a pick-up across town or turn a single transfer into an as-directed day, and it becomes a different journey with a different price, which we will send you before anything is committed.

The figures published on the rates and vehicle pages are quoted figures. They exist so that you can size a journey before contacting anybody, and they are built on a straightforward run at an ordinary hour.

Your price is the one in your quotation. It reflects the actual route, the time of day, whether the car has to reposition to reach you, and what the return leg is doing. Where your journey is the ordinary case, the two figures will be close. Where it starts at half past four in the morning on the far side of a county, it will not be, and we would rather show you that in the quotation than at the end.

The evening before travel, or earlier for a very early start, you receive the chauffeur’s first name, the vehicle and its registration, and a direct number for the day.

That message is worth keeping on the phone that will be with you, not in an inbox on a laptop in the hold. At an airport it is the difference between finding your car in two minutes and standing in an arrivals hall trying to remember which company you booked.

The chauffeur aims to be in position five to ten minutes before the booked time, and will message to say the car is outside rather than ring the bell, unless you have asked for the bell.

Fifteen minutes of waiting from the booked time is included at a private or business address. After that, waiting is charged as the payment terms describe, in quarter hours.

Where a building has no legal stopping place, and plenty in central London and every hospital in the country have none, the chauffeur will wait at the nearest lawful spot and tell you exactly where it is. Standing on a red route to save you forty steps ends with a penalty notice and a car that has been moved on before you get downstairs.

Arrivals are timed from the aircraft, not from the schedule. We track the inbound flight and the chauffeur is in the terminal for the moment the doors open rather than for the printed landing time.

Sixty minutes of free waiting run from touchdown on an international arrival, and forty-five on a domestic one, which is the honest difference border control makes. That allowance covers a normal walk through immigration and baggage reclaim with time in hand.

If reclaim collapses, and at some terminals it periodically does, message the chauffeur. A delayed bag is not a reason to lose the car; it is a reason to tell somebody so the waiting is expected rather than charged by surprise.

Airport bookings are met inside the building as standard. The chauffeur is landside in the arrivals hall with a name board, having parked in the short stay rather than circling a perimeter road waiting for a phone call.

The exact meeting point is on the confirmation and it is specific to the terminal, because arrivals halls are not interchangeable and the useful information is which side of which concourse. For a private aviation arrival the car is normally permitted on the apron or immediately outside the handling agent’s building, and the confirmation names the FBO rather than the airfield.

If you would rather be collected from the forecourt or a car park level, say so and we will arrange it. Some forecourts are drop-off only, and we will tell you when yours is one of them instead of promising something the airport will not allow.

A delayed flight is not a cancelled booking. We watch the tail number, adjust the chauffeur’s departure and keep the job in the diary, and there is no charge for a delay that the flight caused.

A diversion to another airport is a different journey. We will get a car to the new airport wherever it is possible, and the price is requoted against the new route because the original one no longer exists. Where the diversion is somewhere we cannot reach in time, we will say so quickly rather than leave you hoping.

A cancelled flight cancels the collection. Tell us as soon as your airline tells you, and there is nothing to pay under the cancellation policy provided the chauffeur has not already set off.

Any journey time we give you is an estimate built on the roads behaving normally. It is not a term of the contract, and no chauffeur of ours will be asked to make one up by driving badly.

The chauffeur chooses the route, using live traffic and their own knowledge of what the M25 does at that hour. If you want a particular road, or want to avoid one, say so at booking and it will be planned in.

For a flight or a fixed appointment, tell us the time you must be there rather than the time you would like to leave. We will work backwards and propose a pick-up, which is a more useful conversation than agreeing to a departure time that was never going to work.

A stop on the way is fine and is best mentioned at booking, because it changes the route and occasionally the vehicle. Added on the day, a stop is quoted at the roadside and charged as the payment terms set out.

A change of destination mid-journey is usually possible. The chauffeur will confirm the new price before turning, so that nobody is surprised by the number afterwards.

What cannot be added on the day is a passenger the car has no seat for, or a case the boot cannot take. The luggage policy explains why a full boot is a hard limit rather than a preference.

As-directed hire is sold in hours, with a minimum block published on the rates page. The car and chauffeur stay with you for that period and the route is decided as the day goes.

Running over is normal and usually easy. Tell the chauffeur as soon as you know, and the extra time is charged in quarter hours at the rate for that class of car.

Occasionally it is not possible, because the chauffeur has a second job that evening or has run out of lawful hours. You will be told at the start of the day if your booking has a hard finish, so an overrun never becomes a discovery at eleven at night.

There is no tachograph in a chauffeur car, so the discipline is ours rather than a machine’s. We plan long days with a real break in them, and a run that would leave one person at the wheel for more than about ten hours gets either scheduled rest or a second chauffeur.

We will decline a booking we cannot drive safely. It is an uncomfortable answer to give a client who wants a car at four in the morning after a midnight finish, and it is the correct one.

Amendments come to +44 7775 554848 or info@firstclass-chauffeurs.co.uk and are only effective once we have replied. A message sent into a WhatsApp thread at two in the morning has not changed anything until somebody has confirmed it.

Time, date, address, passenger count and vehicle class can all be changed, subject to a car being free. Where the change increases the price we send a revised quotation and wait for your acceptance; where it reduces it, the lower figure applies without argument.

A change so large that it is really a new journey is treated as one. The cancellation policy explains where that line falls and what it costs.

Bookings involving several cars on the same day, a run of consecutive days, or a fixture with road closures around it are quoted individually and confirmed with a schedule rather than a single line.

Those bookings carry their own notice periods for changes and cancellation, set out in the confirmation, because releasing four cars at short notice is not the same problem as releasing one. The event and wedding provisions in the cancellation policy apply to them.

Call the chauffeur first. Most problems on a journey are a wrong door, a closed road or a bag that has not appeared, and the person standing nearest the problem is the person who can fix it fastest.

If that does not resolve it, the number on your confirmation reaches the office at any hour. Anything still unresolved afterwards goes through the complaints procedure, which sets out what we do and by when.