How to complain, and what we will do

Use it for anything that went wrong with a journey or with how we handled a booking: a car that was late, a chauffeur who was rude, an invoice you cannot make sense of, a promise that was not kept.

A question is not a complaint and does not need this procedure. Ask, and you will get an answer the same day without any of the machinery below.

The fastest complaint is the one made in the car. A route you would rather not take, a temperature, a chauffeur talking when you want silence: all of it is fixable in ten seconds and unfixable afterwards.

If it feels awkward, message the office number on your confirmation instead and we will handle it from our end, without the chauffeur being told who said what. Nothing in this clause obliges you to raise something at the time; a complaint made a week later is treated exactly the same way.

Write to info@firstclass-chauffeurs.co.uk, or send it to +44 7775 554848 on WhatsApp if that is where the conversation already is. Either reaches the same people.

There is no form. Plain sentences in whatever order they occur to you are fine, and we will come back with questions if something is not clear.

Four things make a complaint quick to investigate, and none of them requires you to build a case.

• The date of the journey and the pick-up point, so we can find the booking.
• What happened, in your own words.
• What it cost you, if anything, in money or in a missed connection.
• What you would like done about it.

You get an acknowledgement within one working day, from a person, saying who is looking at it. It is not an automated receipt with a reference number, because a business this size does not need one and you should not have to quote one back.

The booking is pulled, along with the timestamps, the messages and the chauffeur’s own account of the journey. Where a charge is in dispute, that charge is held and not chased while the complaint is open.

We answer within five working days. The answer says what we found, what we accept, what we do not, and what we are offering.

Where something takes longer, usually because a partner operator or a third party has to be asked, we tell you inside the five days, explain what we are waiting for and give a date. A holding message with a real date is worth more than silence and a longer promise.

If we got it wrong, the answer says so in the first line. An apology buried under three paragraphs of context is not an apology.

If the stage one answer does not settle it, reply and say so. The complaint goes to the person who runs the business, who was not the one who answered it the first time.

That review takes ten working days and looks at the whole file rather than only the point you challenged. Its outcome is our final position, and the letter will say so plainly, along with what you can do next.

Anything about the way a vehicle was driven, a child seat that was missing or wrongly fitted, a mechanical fault or a chauffeur who seemed unfit to drive skips the queue and is looked at the same day.

Where a chauffeur is the subject of one, they do not drive for us again until it has been resolved. That is inconvenient and occasionally unfair to a chauffeur who has done nothing wrong, and it is still the right order to do things in.

A chauffeur is told what has been said about them and is asked for their account, because a complaint decided without hearing them is not an investigation.

What you are told back is the outcome and what has changed. What we cannot tell you is what happened to that person’s employment or engagement afterwards, which is their private information and not ours to hand over.

The remedies below are the realistic ones, and more than one can apply to the same complaint.

• An apology and an explanation of what actually happened.
• Doing the work again where that is any use, which the Consumer Rights Act 2015 calls repeat performance.
• A reduction in the price, in proportion to what you did not get.
• A refund of a charge that should not have been made.
• Meeting a cost we caused, within clause 10 of the terms and conditions.
• A change to how we do something, which is the only remedy that stops the next person having the same journey.

Give us the chance to answer before going elsewhere. A card chargeback opened on day one takes weeks to unwind and freezes the same money a refund would have returned in five days.

Send photographs early where damage or cleanliness is in issue, and keep anything relevant until the complaint closes. We will do the same with our records.

We are not a member of an alternative dispute resolution scheme. The Alternative Dispute Resolution for Consumer Disputes Regulations 2015 require us to tell you that when we have reached the end of this procedure, and we would rather say it here than at the end of an argument.

What remains open to you is the small claims track of the county court, which is designed to be used without a solicitor; your card issuer, if you paid by card and the service was not provided; and the Citizens Advice consumer service, which will give you a view independent of ours.

A complaint about how we handled your personal data has a different route again, set out at the end of the privacy policy, and it goes to the Information Commissioner’s Office rather than to a court.

Complaint files are kept for six years from the date the complaint closes, for the reasons the privacy policy sets out under retention.

They are also read in bulk once a year. A single late car is an incident; four late cars from the same airport on the same terminal is a process problem, and the only way to see the second is to look at the file rather than the day.