The gap nobody books for
Airport assistance and ground transport are two separate arrangements, made with two different organisations, and neither of them owns the moment between. A passenger who has booked assistance through their airline is looked after through the terminal and then handed over. A passenger who has booked a car has a driver waiting somewhere. The seam between those two is where the difficulty happens, and it is almost never planned for.
This is about that seam: what to arrange, what to tell each side, and what we need from you so the handover is a handover rather than a search.
Two bookings, not one
Assistance inside the airport โ the wheelchair, the buggy, the help through immigration and baggage reclaim โ is arranged with the airline or the airport, in advance, and it is not something a transport company can book on your behalf. It has its own request process and its own notice period, and both are worth checking directly with the carrier when the ticket is issued rather than close to the day.
The car is our booking. What we can do is make our end meet theirs precisely, and that requires knowing the assistance exists. A driver who knows a passenger is arriving with assistance waits differently: in one place, visibly, for as long as it takes, rather than circling a pickup area.
Where assistance actually ends
This is the part that surprises people. Airport assistance does not end at your car. It ends at a point the airport defines โ commonly the arrivals hall or a designated meeting area โ and the passenger is then on their own until they reach whoever is collecting them.
If nobody is standing at that point, the passenger is left at it. That is not a failure of the assistance service; it is the boundary of it. The fix is to have somebody there, which is exactly what our meet and assist service exists to provide, and it is the one situation where we would say plainly that a kerbside pickup is the wrong product.
The comparison between a meet-and-greet and a standard pickup covers the general difference. For a passenger arriving with assistance, the difference stops being about convenience and becomes about whether the journey works at all.
What to tell us, and what it changes
Four things, and each one changes something concrete on our side.
That assistance is booked. The driver waits at the meeting point rather than the kerb, and does not treat a long wait as a no-show.
Whether the passenger uses a wheelchair, and whose it is. An airport wheelchair goes no further than the handover point. A passenger’s own chair travels with them and has to fit in the vehicle. That is a vehicle decision, and our guide to accessible and wheelchair-friendly vehicles sets out what to ask for.
Whether the passenger can walk a short distance. This is the question that most often gets asked the wrong way round. Someone can use assistance through an airport and still walk to a car; someone else cannot walk from the meeting point to a vehicle parked two minutes away. Those need different arrangements, and only you know which is which.
Whether they are travelling alone. A passenger with a companion has someone to make a phone call. A passenger alone does not, and the meeting arrangement has to be correspondingly certain.
Getting into the vehicle is a separate question
Assistance solves the terminal. It does not solve the door of the car, and the two are frequently confused.
A saloon puts the seat low and asks the passenger to lower into it. A van puts the seat closer to standing height with a taller opening and something to hold. For a passenger who is mobile but stiff or tired, that is a bigger factor than anything inside the cabin โ the point our guidance on travelling with older passengers makes at more length. The published fleet shows which classes are stepped up rather than sat down into.
The departure is not the mirror image
Arriving, the passenger is tired and the assistance meets them. Departing, the passenger is fresh but the assistance has to be found โ and it is requested at check-in, which means reaching the desk first.
That makes the departure transfer’s drop-off point the thing to get right: as close to the check-in area the airline uses as the airport allows, rather than the general set-down. Say which airline at booking and it can be planned; say it on the day and it usually cannot.
What we cannot do
We cannot book airport assistance, we cannot escort a passenger through immigration, and we do not provide personal or medical care. A driver is a driver. Where a passenger needs care rather than transport, that has to travel with them.
What we can do is be reliably in the right place with the right vehicle, which is most of the problem, and it only works if the booking says what is coming. Everything above is easier to arrange before a driver is assigned than after, which is the same reason the rest of our booking sequence puts a human review before a driver is allocated at all.