Hourly chauffeur
Keep the car for the day
You are not buying a distance, you are buying a chauffeur’s time and a vehicle that does not go anywhere else. What that changes is everything that happens between the stops.
How the booking works
You give us a start time, a first pickup, and a rough number of hours. You do not need the full itinerary, and in practice most people do not have it yet. The chauffeur takes the schedule as it develops, and the addresses can arrive by message during the day.
Between stops the vehicle stays close but not necessarily visible. Downtown Toronto has very few places a car can idle legally for an hour, so the chauffeur usually sits in a nearby garage or on a permitted side street. The practical rule is that you message when you are two minutes from the lobby and the car is at the door when you reach it.
Because the vehicle is yours for the block, it doubles as somewhere to leave things. Coats, sample cases, a box of printed decks and the bag you do not want to carry into a client meeting all stay in the car. That is not possible on separate point-to-point trips, where the vehicle leaves after each drop.
Hourly also absorbs the thing that breaks scheduled trips: overrun. A meeting that goes forty minutes long does not cascade into a missed pickup and a re-booking, because nobody is waiting for the car elsewhere.
When it is worth it
Hourly against separate trips
The rough test is three stops. Below that, book the trips. At or above it, book the block.
Book hourly when
- Three or more stops in a day
- The finish time is genuinely unknown
- You are carrying material you would rather not carry
- An investor roadshow or a run of back-to-back client meetings
- A visiting executive with a schedule that is still forming
- Evening entertainment where the return time depends on the room
Book a single trip when
- You know both ends and the time
- One meeting, then home or back to the office
- An airport run at either end of a trip
- A gap of several hours where the car would sit unused
For a long gap in the middle of a day, two separate bookings usually beat one long block. Tell us the shape of the day and we will say which is cheaper.
Questions
The mechanics of an hourly booking
Related
An hourly day that starts at an aircraft usually starts at Pearson. If several people need moving at once rather than one person moving repeatedly, see corporate event transportation. Firms booking hourly days most weeks tend to run them through a corporate account.
Reserve
Book the block, not the trips
Tell us the start time and roughly how long, and the itinerary can follow later.