The case for this service is usually made in the language of comfort, which is the least convincing part of it. The real question is arithmetic. How many hours of the day would otherwise be spent driving, parking, walking between a station and an office or standing on a platform, and how many of those hours could you actually use if somebody else were at the wheel? Answer that honestly and the decision tends to make itself.
What follows is that test applied properly, including the days where the honest answer is that you do not need it. There is no shortage of working journeys that are quicker by rail, cheaper by taxi or simply not long enough for anybody to recover anything. Those are set out as plainly as the days where the arrangement earns its keep several times over.
Start with the hours you would recover
Take the day as it stands and mark every stretch you would spend in charge of a vehicle or in transit between one. Add the parking, the walk from the car park and the ten minutes spent finding a space near a client office. That total is what is on offer. The second figure matters more: how much of it you would genuinely convert into calls, reading or preparation rather than staring out of a window.
Somebody who would work solidly for two hours on the M40 is buying something concrete. Somebody who would sleep, and is honest about it, is buying rest, which is worth having but should be judged as rest rather than as productivity. The mistake people make is assuming a car turns every hour into a working hour. It turns the hours you would have spent driving into hours you can use.
Days where it plainly pays
Certain shapes of working day suit the arrangement so obviously that the debate is not worth having. They share a common feature: the schedule is dense, the addresses are awkward, and the cost of arriving flustered is real rather than theoretical.
What links them is that the alternative is not simply less comfortable. It is less reliable. A day with four client sites across a county cannot be run on taxis without at least one of them failing to appear, and a presentation delivered by somebody who has just carried a case up two flights of station stairs is measurably worse than one delivered by somebody who has not.
- Three or more meetings in one day across a city
- Client sites in business parks with no realistic taxi cover
- A day beginning with an early flight and ending with dinner
- Journeys where you must arrive ready to present immediately
- Any day carrying samples, equipment or printed materials
- Board days where two colleagues need to prepare together en route
- Long motorway runs you would otherwise drive before working
Where it is mostly comfort
A single meeting a short distance away, in a city with good transport and nothing to carry, does not need this. Neither does a journey you will spend entirely on a call you could equally take while walking. If the day contains one appointment and it is not a difficult one to reach, a taxi and a clear head will serve you as well as anything with a badge on the bonnet.
It also does less than expected for people who cannot work in a moving car. A significant number of us cannot read on the move without feeling unwell, and no amount of acoustic glazing changes that. If that is you, the arrangement still buys rest and a composed arrival, but it does not buy the working hours the brochures imply, and it should be judged on the first two.
And it does very little where the destination controls the arrival. Some city centres, campuses and event sites restrict vehicle access to the point where the last part of the journey happens on foot regardless. We will tell you where that applies rather than let you find out in a queue of traffic short of the entrance.
Driving yourself, honestly compared
Plenty of people drive themselves and are perfectly content doing it. The comparison deserves making properly rather than dismissing. Your own car costs you the driving hours, the parking, the risk of arriving late from a road closure nobody could plan around, and the fact that you cannot take a call properly while doing it. Against that, it is entirely under your control and requires nobody to be told anything.
The balance usually tips on two questions. Whether the day ends with an event where you would rather not be the one driving home, and whether the schedule leaves any margin at all. A day with a single appointment and a free afternoon is a fine day to drive. A day with five appointments and a dinner is not, and most people already know which of the two they are looking at.
When to book something else
A good proportion of enquiries described to us as executive requirements are better served by a different shape of booking, and occasionally by no booking at all. The right answer depends on how the day is organised rather than on the seniority of whoever is travelling, which is precisely the assumption that leads people to the wrong option.
Describe the day to us on WhatsApp or by email and we will name the one that fits. Where the honest answer is a taxi and a rail ticket, you will hear that instead, which tends to be why people come back later with the days that genuinely do suit the arrangement.
- One meeting, short hop, nothing to carry: take a taxi instead
- Unpredictable finish times across a day: book a chauffeur by the hour
- Eight hours and several counties: a single full-day booking
- A team of four travelling together: one larger vehicle, not four cars
- A flight at either end of the day: an airport chauffeur transfer
- Several cities over consecutive days: a roadshow chauffeur arrangement
- London to Edinburgh on a working day: rail, with a chauffeur at each end
