We don't own a single car.

Hire.Limo is a booking layer over chauffeur companies that already exist. In every city we operate in, there are firms running current-model saloons with properly licensed drivers who are good at this and quietly under-booked. What they generally don't have is a way to be found by someone landing at the airport next Tuesday.

So we do the finding, the pricing and the payment, and they do the driving. The passenger gets one place to book with a price that doesn't move. The operator gets a pre-paid job instead of a lead they have to chase.

Why the price is fixed

A meter is a promise that the number will change. For an airport transfer — where you are jet-lagged, in an unfamiliar city, and in no position to argue about a route — that is the wrong promise. We calculate the fare from the actual route, the time of day and the vehicle class, add the airport fee and the tolls, and then that is the number. If traffic is worse than expected, that is our problem and the operator's, not yours.

Why we check licences

Anyone can put a black car on a website. The difference between a chauffeur company and a man with a nice car is a private-hire or PSV operator licence and commercial insurance for carrying paying passengers — and both expire.

We collect the licence number and both expiry dates at application, we check them before approving anyone, and we check them again automatically at the moment we hand out a job. An operator whose paperwork has lapsed stops receiving work that day, without anyone having to remember. That is not a marketing claim; it is a query in the dispatch code.

Why we add cities slowly

It would be trivial to generate a page for four hundred cities and take bookings in all of them. It would also be dishonest, because we would have nobody to send the job to — and the person finding out would be a passenger standing on a kerb.

A city goes live here when we have vetted operators in it who actually accept work. That is why the list is short and why it grows in step with the supply side rather than ahead of it.

How we make money

A commission on completed bookings — nothing else. No lead fees, no subscriptions from operators, no markup that appears between the quote and the card. If we send an operator no work, we earn nothing from them.