Every transfer supplier will tell you they are licensed and insured. The sentence costs nothing to write and appears on the website of operators who are, operators who are partially, and operators who are describing somebody else’s licence.
The way through is to ask for documents rather than for reassurance, and then to notice how long they take to arrive. Four requests separate an operator from a well-dressed booking account, and none of them should take a real company more than a day.
One. Who is the contracting entity?
Ask for the registered name and the commercial register entry — not the trading name on the invoice, the legal entity that would be a party to a claim. A supplier who trades as one thing, invoices as another and dispatches through a third has not necessarily done anything wrong, but you should know that before an incident rather than during one.
Ours is Zurich-Airport Limousinen Services GmbH, Am Balsberg 36, 8302 Kloten — trading since 2004, a GmbH since 2014, at the same address the cars park at.
Two. Whose insurance covers my passenger?
The word to listen for is commercial. A standard private motor policy in Switzerland does not cover a vehicle carrying fare-paying passengers, which means a driver on private cover is not lightly insured for that journey — for that journey the passenger is uninsured.
Ask for the certificate, and ask specifically whether passenger liability is included and whether it extends to every vehicle that might turn up. Every fare we publish includes passenger insurance and 8.1% VAT inside the figure, because neither is optional and neither should be a line you discover.
Three. Do you employ the chauffeurs, or introduce them?
This is the question that most often changes the answer to the previous two. A platform that matches your booking to the nearest available car has a contract with you for the introduction and a much thinner one with the driver. The licence, the cover and the vetting all sit with a self-employed person you have never met and cannot audit.
A useful follow-up: if the assigned car breaks down at 05:00, who sends the replacement, and are they the same company? Our chauffeurs are ours, the fleet is ours, and there is no subcontracted city operation underneath it — which is why one number, answered by a person at Kloten, covers the whole of it around the clock.
Four. What is subcontracted, and where?
Almost every operator subcontracts something eventually — a fourteen-car programme, a city neither of you covers, an August week when everything is committed. That is normal. What is not normal is finding out afterwards.
Ask when it happens, who the partners are, whether they are held to the same licensing and insurance standard, and whether you are told before the journey or after the invoice. A supplier with a clean answer here has thought about it. A supplier who says it never happens has usually not been asked before.
How to read the response
- Documents attached, same day or next — an operator with its paperwork in order.
- Reassurance in prose, no attachments — ask once more, then draw the conclusion.
- A certificate in someone else’s name — you have found the actual supplier.
- “All our partners are fully licensed” — a sentence about other people, not an answer.
None of this is adversarial, and it should not be presented as though it were. A licensed operator has the four documents to hand and no reason to withhold them; ours go out with the tender response, unasked.