A controller answers the telephone day and night, including bank holidays, and can see every booking and every car while you are speaking to them.
The number above goes straight to the control room, not to a switchboard or an answering service. Whoever picks up is a controller on shift, with the bookings and the dispatch board in front of them, so a question about a car can usually be answered on the first call rather than passed along and returned later.
For an ordinary journey booked a day or more ahead, the booking form is quicker than the telephone: it prices the route you actually enter and confirms it in a minute or so. Ring instead when the online form will not do what you need. It accepts nothing that leaves within the next two hours, where a controller can still take the booking if a car and a chauffeur can be found. Ring, too, for a journey with more than three stops along the way, for more child seats than the form offers, for several cars working together, or for anything that you would rather talk through than type.
It saves time to have a few things ready before you call. If the booking already exists, the reference from the confirmation email is the quickest way in. For a new one, give the pick-up as the actual entrance — the building, the mews, the side door — rather than the nearest main road, and the flight number if the journey starts at an airport, so the arrival can be tracked from take-off. Tell the controller how many people are travelling and how many cases, and say if either end is an underground car park, because two of the cars are too tall for some basement barriers.
Plans change, and changing them is routine. A booking can be moved or cancelled free of charge up to four hours before the pick-up: reply to the confirmation email, cancel it from your account, or ring. Closer in than that, or once the car is already on its way, ring the control room. A journey can be altered while you are in the car — another stop, a different destination — and it is re-priced on the same basis as the original rather than guessed at.
On the day, the chauffeur's details arrive the evening before and nobody should need to call. If you cannot find the car, or the chauffeur cannot find you, ring the control room: the controller can see where the car is and can reach the driver directly, which is faster than the two of you trying each other's numbers.
Email suits whatever is not urgent: a quotation for an event or a wedding, a copy of a receipt or VAT invoice, a question about a past journey, or per-journey mileage for a travel emissions report. It is read in the control room by the same people who answer the telephone, but it is not watched minute by minute in the way the line is, so anything happening in the next few hours belongs on the telephone.
Companies that book regularly usually do better with an account than with individual bookings. An account has a named controller who holds your travellers' preferences, is invoiced monthly rather than card by card, and can be reported by cost centre for whoever reconciles the travel budget. To open one, email with the company's name, a billing contact and a rough idea of how often you travel, or ring and ask for accounts, and a controller will be in touch to set it up.
If something about a journey was not right, tell us — by telephone while it is happening, or by email afterwards — and a controller will look into it. You can also leave a review from your account once a journey is complete. Requests about the personal data we hold, including deleting your account, are covered on the privacy page, and most can be done yourself from the account page.