Planning ground transport for a roadshow

A roadshow day has a published schedule and a real schedule, and they diverge by the second meeting. A meeting runs twenty minutes over. A fourth stop is added at lunch. The order changes because someone's morning freed up. Booking that as six separate point-to-point transfers guarantees that at least two of them are wrong by the time they happen.

As-directed is the right instrument

Hourly, or as-directed, means one car and one chauffeur assigned to the group for a block of time. The car stays with you. Bags stay in the boot. The schedule can change without a booking changing, because there is only one booking. You are buying the chauffeur's day rather than a set of movements.

It is usually cheaper than it looks

Assistants often price a roadshow as transfers because the per-trip number looks smaller. Add the transfers up, add the waiting between them, add the two that had to be rebooked, and hourly is frequently the lower figure — and it is certainly the lower figure in attention spent.

Brief the chauffeur, not just the itinerary

Give the chauffeur the day: the stops in likely order, which ones are firm and which are soft, who is in the car, and who has authority to change the plan on the day. That last one matters more than it sounds. If the principal says one thing and an associate says another, the chauffeur needs to know in advance whose instruction to take.

Two cities in one day

Boston and New York in a single day is a common pattern and a specific problem, because it needs two cars in two markets that behave as one booking. The thing to insist on is that both cities sit on one account with one point of contact — otherwise the assistant becomes the integration layer between two vendors, at exactly the moment she has least capacity for it.

The detail nobody includes and everybody needs

Where the car waits between stops. In dense financial districts this is not always obvious, and a chauffeur circling because there is nowhere to stand is a chauffeur who is four minutes away when the meeting breaks early. A dispatcher who knows the buildings has already solved this. It is worth asking whether yours has.