Terms and conditions of chauffeur hire

First Class Chauffeurs arranges and drives the journeys described on this website. Where these terms say we, us or our, that is who is meant. Where they say you, that means the person who makes the booking, and, when somebody else is travelling on it, the passengers carried under it.

Two channels reach us and both are answered by the same people: +44 7775 554848, which takes voice calls and WhatsApp, and info@firstclass-chauffeurs.co.uk. There is no separate reservations desk and no call centre between you and the person who allocates the car.

These terms apply to every journey we quote for and drive, no matter how the enquiry arrived: a WhatsApp message, an email or a phone call. They apply equally to a single airport run and to a week of as-directed work.

Four shorter documents sit underneath this one and go further into detail. The booking terms deal with how a job is set up and run on the day. The cancellation policy deals with calling one off. The payment terms deal with money. The passenger conduct policy deals with what happens inside the car. Where one of those says something more specific than this document, the more specific wording wins.

The privacy policy, cookie policy, luggage policy, child seats and safety policy, accessibility statement, complaints procedure and website disclaimer are not part of the contract between us. They describe how the business and the site work, and the ones that touch your journey are worth five minutes before you travel.

A handful of terms appear repeatedly across these documents and mean the same thing in all of them.

• Quotation — the written price we send you for a described journey, before you have accepted it.
• Confirmation — the written message we send once you have accepted, setting out the vehicle class, the pick-up point, the time and the price.
• Booking — a journey covered by a confirmation.
• Chauffeur — the person driving, whether they are ours or a colleague working with us on that job.
• As-directed hire — a booking sold by the hour, where the car and chauffeur stay with you and the route is decided as the day goes.
• Waiting time — time the chauffeur spends at the pick-up point after the agreed pick-up time, or after the allowance set out in the booking terms has run out.
• No-show — a booking where nobody appears and nobody makes contact, defined in the cancellation policy.

Nothing on this website is an offer to drive you anywhere. The figures published here are quoted figures, put up so that you can size a journey before asking, and they do not bind either of us.

The contract starts when we send a quotation, you accept it, and we send the confirmation. Acceptance can be a reply on WhatsApp, an email or a spoken yes on the telephone. Until the confirmation has gone out there is no booking, however far the conversation has run and however certain both sides feel.

A quotation stands for seven days unless it says otherwise on its face. For a pick-up inside the next forty-eight hours it stands only while the vehicle is still free, which on a Friday evening in December can be a short window.

We agree to send a chauffeur and a vehicle of the class you booked to the pick-up point you gave, at the time you gave, and to drive you where you asked to go by a route that a sensible person would choose on the day.

The work will be carried out with reasonable care and skill. That is the standard the Consumer Rights Act 2015 sets for a service, and it is the standard we would work to without it.

We agree to keep you informed. If a car is going to be late, you hear it from us before you notice it yourself, with a revised time rather than an apology and no number.

Some journeys are driven by chauffeurs who work with us rather than for us. For a city we do not keep a car in, or an hour when every car is already out, we may pass a job to another operator we have worked with before.

When that happens the contract stays with us. You are not handed a different company to chase, and a complaint about a subcontracted journey is a complaint to us, dealt with under our complaints procedure like any other.

Ask, and we will tell you before the day whether the car coming to you is one of ours or a partner’s. We would rather answer that question than dodge it.

You book a class of vehicle rather than a particular car. Registration numbers, colours and model years are not part of what you are buying, and we do not guarantee any of them.

If the allocated car is damaged, off the road or sitting behind a closure, we will substitute a vehicle of the same class or a higher one, and there is no extra charge for the upgrade. Where the only car that can reach you is from a lower class, we will say so before it sets off, and you can take it at the lower class rate or cancel the booking with nothing to pay.

Where a booking names a specific car because the car is the point of the day, a wedding being the usual case, we say so in the confirmation and treat it as a term of that booking rather than a preference.

Most journeys that go wrong go wrong because of a missing detail rather than a missing car. The list below is what we need, and the booking terms explain what each one is for.

• A pick-up address complete enough to drive to, including the entrance if the building has more than one.
• A mobile number that will be switched on and answered on the day of travel.
• The flight number or the tail number for anything meeting an aircraft.
• How many passengers are travelling and how many large cases are coming with them.
• Any child seat required, with the notice the child seats and safety policy asks for.
• Any mobility, hearing or sight requirement, so the right car and the right amount of time are allowed.
• Any stop on the way, because a stop changes both the route and the price.

If you are booking for yourself rather than for a business, you are a consumer, and the Consumer Rights Act 2015 gives you rights that nothing written here can reduce.

The service must be performed with reasonable care and skill, within a reasonable time where no time was agreed, and for a reasonable price where no price was agreed. Where we fall short, you can ask us to do the work again, and where doing it again is impossible or we do not manage it within a reasonable time, you can ask for money back to reflect what you did not get.

Citizens Advice runs a consumer service that will explain those rights to you independently of us, and we would rather you used it than took our word for what the law says.

We are responsible for loss or damage you suffer where it is a foreseeable consequence of us breaking this contract or failing to use reasonable care and skill. Loss is foreseeable if it is obvious that it will happen, or if we both knew it might when the booking was confirmed.

A missed flight, a lost hotel deposit or a fee for a meeting that did not happen are consequential losses. Where we caused one and the risk of it was clear to us, we will meet it, which is the reason we ask what the journey is for and which flight it is feeding. Where the cause was elsewhere, we will not.

Where you book on behalf of a business, our total liability for any one booking is capped at the price of that booking. Where you book as a consumer we apply no cap at all: the foreseeability rule above is the limit, because a fixed cap sitting across your statutory rights would be unfair and would not hold up.

Nothing in these terms, and nothing in the documents beneath them, limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else the law does not permit a business to limit. If a clause anywhere in this set appears to do one of those things, that clause has no effect and everything around it stands.

This is not a formality inserted by habit. A company that tried to sign away responsibility for injuring somebody it was carrying would not deserve to be carrying them.

You are responsible for loss or damage caused deliberately or carelessly by you or by anyone travelling under your booking. In practice that means damage to trim or a fitting, a broken screen or handle, and soiling serious enough to take the car off the road while it is cleaned.

We charge the cost of putting it right, plus the income lost while the vehicle is unavailable, and we show you the repair or valeting invoice and the diary entries behind both figures. The passenger conduct policy explains how that is assessed and what we do if you disagree with it.

Neither of us is in breach for failing to do something that a genuinely exceptional event prevented. Severe weather closing a road network, a strike, a terrorist incident, an airport shutdown, a fuel supply failure or a public health restriction making the journey unlawful all qualify.

Ordinary traffic does not qualify. Neither does rain, a football fixture we should have looked up, or a road closure that had been advertised for a month.

Where such an event stops a journey we will contact you as soon as we know, offer an alternative date if one is any use to you, and refund in full anything paid for a journey that cannot now happen.

These terms are revised from time to time. The version governing your journey is the one published on the day we sent your confirmation, and the effective date at the top of this page tells you when the current version came into force.

If we change them in a way that materially affects a booking already confirmed, we will tell you what has changed and you may cancel that booking without charge. Keeping a copy of the confirmation is worth doing; it names the version you agreed to.

You can cancel a confirmed booking at any point. What it costs depends on the notice you give, and the bands are set out in the cancellation policy rather than here.

We can end a booking before or during the journey if a passenger’s behaviour makes continuing unsafe or unlawful, if the vehicle is being damaged, or if a payment that fell due before travel has not arrived. Where a journey is ended part way through for one of those reasons the fare remains payable in full, and we will set out in writing why the decision was taken.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland you may bring proceedings in your own courts, and we may only bring proceedings against you there.

Notice under these terms is given by email to info@firstclass-chauffeurs.co.uk or by message to +44 7775 554848, and takes effect when it arrives. Anything sent after six in the evening takes effect on the next working day, because that is when somebody will read it.

If a court finds any part of these terms unenforceable, that part is removed and the rest continues to apply. A right we do not enforce on one occasion is not a right we have given up.