Logan & airports
What flight tracking actually changes
It sounds like a feature. It is really a decision about who absorbs the risk of a delay — you, or the operator.
If a car service books your pickup against the scheduled landing time and the flight is ninety minutes late, one of two things happens. Either the car sits there for ninety minutes and somebody pays for that, or the car leaves and you land to nothing. Flight tracking is the mechanism that avoids both.
What the dispatcher is actually doing
When a flight number is attached to a reservation, the dispatch system watches the aircraft's status and shifts the pickup in step with it. The chauffeur's assignment time moves. Nobody calls anyone. The traveller, who is in the air and unreachable, does not need to do anything, and neither does the assistant who booked it and has since moved on to five other things.
Why it matters more for the booker than the passenger
The passenger experiences flight tracking as the car simply being there. The assistant experiences it as not having to monitor a flight from her desk. That second thing is the real product. The alternative is an afternoon of refreshing an airline app and calling a dispatcher to push a pickup twice.
The billing consequence
Because the grace window runs from actual landing rather than booked time, a delay does not become a wait-time charge. This is the single most common surprise on a ground transport invoice from an operator that does not track properly: a two-hour delay that arrives as two hours of billable waiting, discovered at month end by someone who was not on the trip.
What it cannot do
Tracking tells us when the aircraft touched down. It does not tell us that the traveller was in the last row, that the gate was occupied, or that a bag took forty minutes. That is why the grace window exists after landing, and why a text from the traveller when the bags are in hand is still the thing that calls the car forward.
Questions
Commonly asked
What if the traveller changes to an earlier flight?+
Tell dispatch the new flight number. Tracking follows an aircraft, so a different aircraft needs to be pointed at.
Does a diverted flight break this?+
It is handled, but not automatically — a diversion becomes a phone call from our desk to you, because the decision about what to do next is yours rather than ours.
Ready when you are
Book a car, or set up an account.
Executive black car in Boston and New York, with service across all 50 states, Canada and Europe.