Most of the time, yes. A London collection at short notice can often be covered within an hour or two, and reservations are answered at any hour of any day. What narrows is choice of vehicle, not availability itself, and the further from London the start point sits, the more notice the car needs.
Category
Booking and pricing
Contact
+44 7775 554848 or info@firstclass-chauffeurs.co.uk
01/The short answer
Most of the time, yes. A London collection at short notice can often be covered within an hour or two, and reservations are answered at any hour of any day. What narrows is choice of vehicle, not availability itself, and the further from London the start point sits, the more notice the car needs.
Short notice is not an unusual request in this business. Flights get rebooked, meetings move, and someone occasionally realises at nine at night that the eight o'clock train tomorrow is not going to work. The diary is built with that in mind rather than treating it as an exception.
QA-01/What we need from you when time is short
What we need from you when time is short
Four things get a car moving: where you are, where you are going, when you need to leave and how many of you there are. Everything else can follow. If there is luggage, say how much, because that decides between a saloon and a V-Class before anything else does.
Call or message +44 7775 554848 rather than emailing when the timescale is tight. The line is answered around the clock, and a two minute conversation settles a booking that would take three emails and an hour to resolve in writing.
Pickup postcode or the exact terminal and arrivals hall
Destination, and any stop on the way
The time you need to be moving
Passengers, and roughly how many bags
A mobile number the chauffeur can reach on the day
QA-02/Where short notice is easiest and hardest
Where short notice is easiest and hardest
Central London is the simplest. There are cars in the area for most of the day, and repositioning one takes minutes rather than hours. The Heathrow corridor behaves similarly, since there is almost always something finishing a job near the airport.
It gets harder as you move outward, and hardest for a specific vehicle at a specific hour. A Phantom this afternoon is a different question from a saloon this afternoon. A car in Inverness tomorrow morning is a different question again, because it may need to travel overnight to be there.
QA-03/What a short notice booking does not cost you
What a short notice booking does not cost you
There is no surcharge for urgency. The card rate applies whether the booking was made three weeks ago or twenty minutes ago, and the service is the same one, driven by the same standard of chauffeur, in a car that has been cleaned.
What you might sacrifice is the exact vehicle you had in mind. If the S-Class is out, the honest answer is an E-Class or an i7 now rather than an S-Class in four hours, and we will say which we can actually do rather than promising and hoping.
QA-04/Overnight and small hours requests
Overnight and small hours requests
Three in the morning is a real time and gets a real answer. Night collections from a terminal after a long-haul delay are routine, as are early starts where the car is on the doorstep at half past four and nobody has had to phone twice to confirm.
For a genuinely unpredictable finish, an overnight hospital stay or a flight nobody can put a time on, booking hourly and letting the chauffeur hold is calmer than trying to guess a collection time and rebooking it twice.
No. The published card is the card, and urgency does not move it. The only thing that changes a short notice price is the vehicle actually available, so a booking that ends up in a larger car costs what that larger car costs, and you are told before it is confirmed.
How quickly can a car reach me in central London?
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It depends on the hour and the traffic rather than on any promise worth making in advance. Within the congestion zone in the middle of a weekday it is usually a short wait; at five on a Friday it is longer, and we will give you a realistic figure rather than an optimistic one.
Can I book a last minute car outside London?
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Yes, though the notice needed grows with the distance from a city. Regional cities are generally straightforward. Rural collections at short notice are the hardest case, because the nearest available vehicle may be an hour away before it starts your journey.
Tell us the journey. We will send the price in writing.
Message us the date, the pick-up and where you are going. You will get a fixed written quotation with the vehicle, the chauffeur’s arrival time and what the figure includes — no form to fill in, and no estimate that moves later.
