Airport transfers by chauffeur, London

An airport transfer is the one journey where the time on the booking is known in advance to be wrong. A flight due at twenty to seven may land at quarter past six or still be over the Channel at eight. So an arrival is booked against the flight number as well as the clock. The control room follows the flight from take-off and moves the car's timing with it, which is why nobody has to ring from the baggage hall to say the plane was held.

Waiting is counted from touchdown, not from the time first written on the booking. The complimentary allowance at an airport is deliberately longer than the one at a front door, because a queue at passport control or a slow belt is not the passenger's doing. Anything beyond it is billed afterwards, in short blocks, from the same pricing tables the fare came from and a controller looks at what actually happened on the night before any of it reaches a bill.

On an arrival the chauffeur is inside the terminal at the barrier with a name board, not sitting in the car waiting for a text message. Meeting you there has its own line on the quote rather than being left unsaid, so it is plain that nothing was forgotten. While he is inside, the car sits in short-stay parking, and that tariff, which differs from one airport to the next, is a line on the fare shown before you confirm. A departure costs less to enter: the car sets down at the forecourt and pays only the drop-off charge. At the private aviation terminals there is no public tariff at all, and the car is met by arrangement with the handling agent.

The fare itself is fixed at booking and measured on the road distance between the terminal and your address, with the airport's charge, the congestion charge where the route and the hour incur it, and any night or bank holiday rate already inside the figure. A journey typed into the booking form as an ordinary run that happens to begin or end at a terminal is recognised as a transfer, so the flight number field appears and the airport waiting allowance applies without anybody having to know to ask for them.

Luggage decides the car more often than the number of people does. The booking form shows each car's seats and cases beside its fare and says so when a party is larger than the car chosen, but it cannot see a golf bag, a pair of skis or a cot. Ring the control room with anything of that kind when you book, and the question of whether it fits is settled before the day instead of at the kerb in front of the terminal. A family back from a fortnight away is often better off in the people carrier than in a saloon with enough seats and too little boot.

This page covers what is the same at every airport. What is not differs enough to need a page each, and the six airport pages linked below are written for the particular building. The booking form also takes Southend, Biggin Hill, RAF Northolt, Birmingham and Manchester, which are priced and run in exactly the same way.