The walk out of customs into an arrivals hall is a strange few seconds. You are tired, the light changes, and there is a wall of faces and handwritten signs that all look broadly identical. Knowing exactly what you are looking for, and where, turns that moment from mildly stressful into the point at which the journey stops being your responsibility.
Meet and greet is a specific thing rather than a marketing phrase, and it is worth being precise about what it includes. It means somebody standing in the public arrivals hall with your name on a board, ready to take your bags. It does not mean anything happening on the other side of the border, and we will not suggest otherwise.
Where the board will be
Every arrivals hall has a designated meeting area, generally directly ahead as you emerge from customs and behind a barrier that keeps the walkway clear. That is where your chauffeur will be standing, in a suit, holding a board with your name on it. At the larger terminals the area is signposted and sometimes lettered by zone, and it is the first thing you should look for rather than scanning the whole hall at once.
The board carries your name rather than any company branding, which is deliberate. If you would rather it showed a different name, or initials, or nothing recognisable at all, say so when you book and it will be arranged that way. Discretion at the point of arrival is one of the easiest things to get right and one of the most noticeable when it is not.
What we send you before you fly
Ahead of the journey you receive a message with the practical details, so that you are not landing into uncertainty. It sets out who is collecting you, what they will be driving, and where they intend to be standing. Keep it accessible offline if you are arriving somewhere your phone may take a while to reconnect, because the useful information is precisely the information you cannot look up while you are still in a queue.
If anything about the arrival changes, that same thread is where to tell us. A different terminal, an earlier flight, a companion arriving separately: all of it lands in one place and reaches whoever needs it. Everything runs over WhatsApp and email rather than through a call centre, which means there is a written record neither of us has to remember from memory.
- The chauffeur's name, so you know who to expect
- The make, model and colour of the vehicle collecting you
- Where in the arrivals hall the chauffeur intends to stand
- What the name board will say, if you asked for something discreet
- The terminal we are expecting you to come through
- How to reach us in writing the moment anything changes
If you cannot find each other
It happens occasionally, usually because two flights land together and the meeting area is three deep, or because a terminal has more than one exit from customs and you have come out of the far one. The answer is always the same: send us a message saying where you are standing, and stay there. Two people wandering a terminal in opposite directions is a genuinely reliable way to miss each other for twenty minutes.
It is also worth knowing what will not happen. Nobody will meet you at the gate, walk you through immigration or move you up a queue, because chauffeurs have no access beyond the public side of the terminal and no standing at the border. Anyone promising otherwise is describing a service they cannot deliver. Once you are through, though, everything from the bags onward stops being yours to think about.
