What Clients Should Expect From A Vetted Chauffeur

Most chauffeur companies say their chauffeurs are vetted. Almost none say what a client should expect as a result, which is the part that actually matters when you are standing outside a hotel at seven in the morning. This is our answer to that question, written as a list of things you can check rather than a list of things we would like you to believe.

Start with the arrival. A vetted chauffeur is there before you are. Not at the appointed minute, but ahead of it, parked where the address allows and already out of the car by the time you appear. Arriving with the client is a failure that happens to work out; arriving after them is the same failure without the luck. If the collection point is difficult — a private address with no frontage, a hotel with a service entrance, a terminal with three different kerbs — that has been worked out before the day rather than in the last two minutes of it.

Then the door. It is opened for you, held, and closed properly rather than pushed. It sounds like a small thing and it is the most reliable single indicator on this list, because it is the first piece of the work that cannot be faked by a driver who is good at driving. Someone who has been trained will also know when not to do it: a client walking fast, carrying a call, or plainly wanting to get in and go is not served by a ceremony.

The greeting should be short. Your name, confirmation of where you are going, and then quiet. A chauffeur who opens with small talk has misunderstood which of you sets the tone. If you want to talk, the conversation is there; if you do not, it never starts, and you should not have to signal that twice.

Expect the route to be known. Not looked up at the kerb — known, or at least decided, with an alternative in mind for the part of it that is likely to be slow. The visible symptom of the opposite is a phone being consulted after the doors close, which tells you the planning is happening at the same moment as the driving.

The driving itself is where vetting shows most and is described least. What you are looking for is the absence of events: no late braking, no lane changes you notice, no acceleration that moves you in the seat, no sudden gap-taking at a roundabout. A journey you can read in, or work in, or sleep in, is the product. Our own assessment looks at exactly this — how smoothly someone drives, how early they spot a hazard, and how calm they stay when a journey goes wrong — because those three things predict the passenger's experience better than any licence check does.

Expect competence when something does go wrong, because eventually something does. A road closed, a delay, a change of plan called in from the back seat. The vetted version of that moment is unremarkable: it is acknowledged, a decision is taken, and you are told what has changed if it affects you. The unvetted version is either a running commentary or silence followed by a surprise.

Expect discretion to extend past the journey. What is discussed in the car, who was collected from where, and the fact that a booking exists at all are treated as private. A chauffeur who tells you an anecdote about a previous client has told you exactly what will be said about you, and it is the one failure on this list that a client can detect in a single sentence.

There are also things you should never have to think about, which is a harder list to notice precisely because it is made of absences. Whether the vehicle is clean inside. Whether the chauffeur has been driving for fourteen hours. Whether their licence is current. Whether the person who turned up is the person who was assigned. Those are ours to manage, through checks repeated on a fixed schedule and duty hours that are managed rather than left to willingness, and the sign that we are managing them is that they never become your problem.

Finally, expect to be able to ask. A client who wants to know how the person driving them was selected is asking a reasonable question, and the answer should be specific rather than reassuring. Ours is set out in full on the chauffeur selection page: background verification, references taken by telephone, a driving assessment, training, a probation of at least three months, three levels of clearance, and re-checking on a schedule. If an operator cannot describe their process in that much detail, it is worth asking why.