Planning Chauffeur Travel for Wimbledon

Play on the outside courts begins late in the morning and the show courts follow an hour or so later, but neither start time tells you anything useful about the end. Matches are played to a finish, the order of play on each court is a queue rather than a timetable, and a match you particularly want to see may be third on and therefore anywhere between mid-afternoon and late evening.

This makes a fixed return booking the wrong instrument. What works is an open arrangement in which the car is held for the day and comes when you message, whether that is four in the afternoon or after eleven at night. It costs a little more in held hours than a pair of transfers and removes the only genuinely stressful decision of the day, which is whether to leave a match early.

If you are attending on a ticket for a specific court, ask yourself honestly whether you would walk out on a fifth set to make a car. Most people would not, and having answered that, the open arrangement becomes obvious rather than indulgent. Tell us at the point of booking that the finish is unknown, and the day is planned around that rather than around a time nobody believes.

The roads carrying the tournament are the A3 and the routes through Putney, Wandsworth and Southfields, and during the fortnight they carry a great deal more than they were built for. Arrival hours are slow in a way that is not proportionate to the distance covered. From central London the journey is short on paper and considerably longer in practice on any morning of the first week.

Local restrictions do most of the rest. Controlled parking covers the residential streets around the grounds for the duration, several roads are managed by police and stewards, and the arrangements can change through the fortnight and between weekdays and the middle weekend. None of this is a problem if you are being dropped and collected. It is a substantial problem if you were planning to park.

The practical answer is to leave earlier than you would for a distance of that kind and to treat the last mile as the variable one. If you are queueing for a ground pass rather than holding a court ticket, add more time again, since that queue has its own rhythm and rewards an early arrival more than almost anything else about the tournament does.

A car cannot sit outside the gates for eleven hours, and nobody would want to pay for one that tried. The workable arrangement is a set-down at an agreed corner within a short walk of the entrance, after which the chauffeur moves to a legal waiting position nearby and returns to the same corner when you message. In practice the wait between your message and the car is a few minutes.

Because the stewarding varies, the corner is confirmed on the day rather than promised in advance. It is worth agreeing it in both directions before you go in, and taking a note of it, because finding a specific street on a phone at half past ten at night among several thousand other people leaving is harder than it sounds. A photograph of the corner on arrival solves this entirely.

Rain does not cancel the day, it postpones it, and the postponement lands at the end. Covered courts continue while uncovered ones wait, so a wet afternoon frequently produces a much later finish than a dry one rather than an earlier escape. If your plan assumed a wet day would be a short day, reverse the assumption, because the opposite is closer to the truth.

The other consequence is standing about. Wet queues, wet grass and a long wait under an awning make a change of shoes and a proper coat worth leaving in the car. Ask your chauffeur to keep them accessible rather than in the boot under everything else, and take the umbrella with you rather than leaving it where it will be of no use at all.

A great many people go straight from the grounds into town for dinner, and it works well provided the reservation is made with the right assumptions. Book later than you think and choose a restaurant that will hold a table with a message rather than one that will release it at ten past. From SW19 into the West End at that hour is not a long drive, and the car makes it a comfortable one.

If you would rather go home, the same principle applies in reverse: there is no need to hurry out with everybody else. Waiting twenty minutes in a quiet cabin while the roads clear is faster in real terms than joining the walk to the station at the moment it is busiest, and considerably more pleasant after a day spent standing.

Where a group has attended together on different tickets, agree the meeting point outside before anyone goes in, and give one person responsibility for messaging the chauffeur. Groups that arrange the return by committee at eleven at night, in a crowd, on failing phone batteries, will always take longer than groups that settled it at eleven in the morning. It is a two-minute conversation that saves half an hour at the wrong end of the day.