Hiring a chauffeur is not a driving test. Everyone who reaches us can drive; that is the least interesting thing about them. What we are actually assessing is whether a person can be trusted alone, at night, with somebody else’s principal, their luggage and their conversation — and whether they will still be doing it well in year four.
The sequence below is the order we run it in, and the order matters. Each stage is cheaper than the one after it, so the disqualifying things are found first.
One. The licence
A licence for professional passenger transport, held before the first conversation about a shift. This is not the licence in most wallets — it carries its own examination, its own medical standard and its own renewal cycle. Every chauffeur who drives for us is also a graduate of the Chauffeur Limousine Academy.
Neither of those is a distinction. They are the door.
Two. The medical
Current, and kept current rather than filed once. A chauffeur’s working day can begin at 04:00 for a first wave of arrivals and end after a late inbound, so eyesight and cardiac fitness are re-established on a schedule rather than at hiring. This stage comes early because it is quick and it is absolute.
Three. The background check
Run before the first shift and renewed afterwards, which is the part most operators skip. A single check at hiring tells you about a person on one day several years ago. Our chauffeurs work unaccompanied with senior people, sometimes in their homes, often with their documents in the boot. A one-off check does not carry that weight for a decade.
Four. The training
Ours, not a certificate from elsewhere, and it covers four things.
- Defensive driving — not speed, the opposite. The smoothness a passenger notices only by not noticing it.
- Airport procedure — which meeting point, where customs releases into the hall, how the General Aviation handover works, what to do when a flight lands early.
- Luggage and door protocol — which door, in what order, who touches the cases, and how to do all of it without a conversation.
- How to say nothing at all for ninety minutes. This is the hardest one to teach and the one clients remember.
Five. The fortnight of shadowing
Then two weeks alongside someone who has done it for years, on real work, before a first solo shift. Nothing in the training substitutes for watching an experienced chauffeur absorb a delayed arrival, a passenger who is furious about something that happened in Frankfurt, or a client who wants the radio off and the partition up without being asked twice.
Shadowing is also the last honest filter. Some people pass every prior stage and are visibly wrong in the car, and a fortnight is long enough to see it.
What happens after
Most of the team has been driving for us for more than five years. That is the whole quality-control story, and it is not an accident of loyalty — it is what you get by rostering predictably, paying properly and not treating chauffeurs as interchangeable capacity.
Tenure is also what lets us name a chauffeur in advance for multi-day work. You cannot promise a client the same person for three days if the roster is a marketplace.
Five stages, and only the first two are about driving. The whole sequence takes about six weeks, most of it the fortnight of shadowing, and it is the reason we can name the chauffeur on a three-day programme before the programme starts.