Every airport collection comes down to one decision made in advance: does the chauffeur come inside the building to find you, or do you go outside to find the car? Both are legitimate and both work. What causes trouble is leaving the choice unmade until after you have landed, at which point you are in a crowded hall with a phone that has just reconnected to a new network.
The two options also carry different amounts of risk, and the risk falls in different places. Meet and greet transfers almost all of the coordination onto the chauffeur before you land. Kerbside keeps some of it with you, which is fine when you are travelling light and know the airport, and less fine when you are not. This page sets out where each genuinely belongs.
What each one actually is
Meet and greet, in our sense of the phrase, means your chauffeur parks the car, walks into the terminal and stands in the public arrivals hall holding a board with your name on it. When you emerge from the customs channel, they take your luggage and walk you out to the car. Everything that involves finding one another happens before you have to think about it.
Kerbside means the car comes to the designated pickup area and you walk out to meet it, usually after a short exchange of messages to confirm you are through. It is quicker in the best case and it involves no board and no waiting in a hall. It also depends on both parties being where they said they would be at roughly the same moment, which is the part that occasionally fails.
The case for being met inside
The strongest argument for meet and greet is that it removes coordination at exactly the point you are least able to do it. You have been on an aircraft, your phone has just found a network, you are carrying more than you would like, and possibly you are somewhere you have never been before. Walking out of a door and seeing your own name on a board resolves all of that instantly.
It also matters when the walk out of the building is long. At the larger airports the distance from the reclaim hall to the pickup area can be considerable, sometimes involving lifts, a bridge or a shuttle. Being handed over at the arrivals doors, with the cases taken from you, converts that walk from a chore into a short stroll alongside somebody who knows the way.
The third argument is simply that somebody is accountable for being there. A chauffeur standing in a hall with a board has committed to a place and a time. It is a much stronger promise than a car somewhere in the vicinity, and it is why families, first-time visitors and anyone arriving late tend to choose it.
The case for kerbside
Kerbside is genuinely the better answer more often than the industry likes to admit. If you are travelling alone with a cabin bag, on a route you fly regularly, into a terminal you could navigate half asleep, then walking out to a waiting car is quicker and involves less standing about than being met inside. Some people also simply dislike having their name held up in public, which is a perfectly reasonable preference.
It suits short domestic hops particularly well, where you may be through the building before a meet and greet would have added any value at all. It also suits the compact regional terminals, where the pickup area is a few paces from the doors and the whole question is close to academic. In those cases we will arrange kerbside without treating it as a compromise.
Where kerbside tends to go wrong
Almost all of the failures follow the same pattern: the passenger and the car are both at the airport, both on time, and unable to describe their position to one another. Add a delayed bag, a phone with no roaming, several similar exits and a pickup area where stopping is restricted, and a plan that seemed simple becomes a series of increasingly terse messages.
None of this is exotic. It is simply what happens when the coordination is left until the moment of arrival rather than settled in advance. The situations below are the ones where we would steer someone towards being met inside instead, not because kerbside is bad but because these particular arrivals give it too much to cope with.
- A large airport with several exits and no obvious landmark to name
- A first visit to a terminal you have never used before
- A phone without roaming or with a battery already close to flat
- Four cases, a pushchair and two tired children
- A late-night arrival when the hall is emptying and signage is less obvious
- Restricted stopping areas where the car cannot simply wait for you
- Any arrival where a second passenger is meeting you inside the building
What neither option includes
It is worth being blunt about the boundary, because the industry is not always clear on it. Neither meet and greet nor kerbside involves any airside element. No chauffeur meets you at the gate, walks you through the border, carries your bag from the aircraft or moves you up a queue. The arrivals hall on the public side of customs is where any chauffeur service can begin, and that is a rule rather than a policy choice.
We are an independent chauffeur company. We hold no partnership, affiliation or accreditation with any airport, terminal operator, handling agent or airline, and we do not offer fast-track or lounge access. What we do is turn up, wait, take the luggage and drive. Sharing your flight number lets us plan around the published schedule and the clearance times we would ordinarily expect, which is planning rather than tracking.
Choosing between them
The decision takes ten seconds at the point of booking and it is worth making deliberately. Ask yourself how much you are carrying, how well you know the terminal, what time you land, and how much you want to think on arrival. If more than one of those answers is unhelpful, be met inside. If all of them are easy, kerbside is fine.
Whichever you choose, tell us at booking rather than on the day, and give us a WhatsApp number that will work when you land. Changing the arrangement afterwards is possible and we will do it, but it is much simpler to set up correctly in advance than to reorganise while standing in a doorway with your luggage.
- Count your cases honestly, not optimistically
- Consider whether you have used the terminal before
- Think about the hour: late arrivals favour being met inside
- Check whether your phone will actually work on landing
- Decide once, at booking, and tell us which you want
