Chauffeur and transfer services

A transfer is the first and the last thing a guest experiences of a destination, and it is almost never owned by the property whose name is on it. It begins as an email confirming a time, and then the entire product is whether the car is where that email said it would be.

The wait is the service. Standing in an arrivals hall scanning for your own name is the most anxious minute in luxury travel, and it is decided by things a client never sees: whether the flight was tracked, where the driver was told to stand, what the board actually said, whether anybody telephoned when it slipped.

Then forty minutes in a small space with a stranger. The temperature nobody adjusts. The conversation nobody offers, or nobody wanted. The route taken without a word of explanation, the call answered in front of the client, the water that was or was not there. And a handover at the far end that either delivers the guest into the next thing or leaves them at a kerb with their luggage.

• Operators whose drivers are the first person a guest meets in the country.
• Hotels and lodges arranging transfers under their own name that nobody there has ever taken.
• Anyone whose service is judged, fairly or not, on a single minute in an arrivals hall.

• What the booking confirmed, and what actually happened at the meeting point.
• How the wait was handled on a day the timing moved.
• What forty minutes in the car were like for a client who did not want to talk.
• How the guest was handed over at the other end, and to what.