Why Punctuality Matters in Professional Limousine Services in Dubai
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A timely arrival of a limousine isn’t a “bonus feature. It’s the entire product. As soon as a customer books a limousine in Dubai, they are sure that a car and driver will be at the time and location they have booked, irrespective of the traffic jams, weather or anything else that Dubai has in store that day. All else is window dressing to the one promise.
This is important in Dubai, and may not necessarily be in a smaller quieter city. Dubai is an operation that has to work on extreme times, and there are many things that will fall in the right place, there will be heavy traffic, important events that may close down a major road; a business culture that will punish those 15 minutes that are five minutes late to a meeting. In practical terms, a car service which has punctuality as a mere objective, not a way of doing business, is the same as a car service that does not have punctuality as its top priority.
This is crucial because it will give you an idea of how you should approach any dubai sedan hire company before hiring them. A good car is one that has been consumed. It is a standard to all the operators to provide comfortable seating, air condition, clean interior in almost all the operators found in the city. It’s not the equipment that makes the difference, it’s the person. It’s whether or not the vehicle arrives when they expect it, and then again, at every time.
Whether it be a wedding or client meeting, when you are using a limousine taxi for an airport run, consider what you are paying for. You’re not buying transportations per se, you can get from A to B for half a dozen less $$$! You’re purchasing assurance in regards to timing, topped with transportation. Eliminate the certainty and the value proposition goes away, and it’s merely a high-cost taxi ride.
This reframing becomes relevant because it impacts what questions you should ask prior to booking. Aside from the question of what kind of car you will be driving, ask how they keep up timely deliveries, what do they do when the car doesn’t run as smoothly as you would like, and do they have a history of having a good running record or did they just have good luck on the days you have scheduled a car trip?
So, what actually takes place when a Limousine is delayed? Lateness has not the same consequences for all. This is because punctuality behavior is considered to be an operational problem by businesses that take care of their business, because of their dependence on the nature of the booking.
Weddings are an extremely busy and hectic day and cause a lot of stress. It’s not just fifteen minutes late, it can affect the time of the ceremony, the starting time of the pictures, the time it takes to get the pictures processed, the starting time of the reception, can affect the time the vendor contracts are negotiated with the vendors and can have set time limits, catering service times and can affect the time limit for the venue changeover for whatever comes later in the night. One missed pick up could have an impact on the whole day and cannot be repeated as it had been months of planning.
Whenever a customer has to wait 15 minutes for an executive or the client to meet them, it can be seen as disrespect of the customer or of the client.From the customer’s perspective, 15 minutes of waiting for an executive or the client to meet may be interpreted as not being serious about the customer or the customer. Although the passenger may not be at fault for the lateness of the car service, an untimely arrival in a culture or industry where timeliness is a sign of respect and competence is a sign of disrespect and incompetence about the passenger. Companies are in part protecting their reputation by hiring a corporate chauffeur service for their visitors because they can count on the services that they have arranged for their visitors.
Lateness in this sense is most literal, particularly at this point. A missed flight is never a fun scenario, it is also a very costly missed flight, including rebooking, missed connection with someone else, disruption to scheduled meetings and events at the destination and in some cases, a trip off the tracks due to a missed departure. At airport bookings there is a consequence that you cannot find in other bookings: A flight will wait.
This problem applies to concerts, conferences, graduation ceremonies and other situations with fixed time events. Being late to an event that has a hard start time is not only inconvenient to the passenger, but can also result in missing out on the event they paid to attend for in the first place.
These are all cases in which there may not always be a small price to be paid for delay; it is not only the delay but also the consequences of the delay. It adds up and thus is vital to the professional operators not to be part of it in the first place, but only sorry about it later.
All days were the same would be easy to keep the clock right. Dubai does make it a lot more difficult, and that’s why this is a difference between those operators who take it seriously and those who don’t.
Roads and highways, such as Sheikh Zayed Road and the other major arterial roads in Dubai, are also extremely busy and can vary a lot in terms of the amount of traffic and their nature based on the time of day. A route may take 20 minutes to travel in the morning, and 50 minutes in the evening rush hour. The consequence of this variability if it is not taken into account in advance is that a driver/dispatch that doesn’t consider it is essentially playing a game of chance with each booking, which is made in or around peak hours.
Dubai’s Salik toll gate system complicates the route planning. Some routes that are shown on maps are efficient, but have more than one toll crossing that will make the journey more expensive than it would be if there were only one, as other toll takers will be in place longer than they need to be. A good dispatch team will take the time to draw up a route that takes this into consideration regardless of what the navigation app deems the quickest route at the time.
Many roads and street exits & access roads in Dubai haven’t been done and change is constant so drivers who are unaware of the latest changes will be caught out. This time the driver might have to take a detour to get to the same hotel he used to take the shortest route to 6 months ago, resulting in a 15 minute longer trip.
Depending on the nature of the event, such as a Formula 1 weekend, major conference or national celebration, or large public event, it is quite likely that the public will be taken aback by the closure of a road or the marked increase in traffic around a particular venue. A company that doesn’t keep its eyes on what’s going on in the city on a particular day could be caught by surprise by congestion that they should have foreseen.
However, sandstorms and heavy rainfall aren’t that common but when they do occur they can drastically affect the visibility and travel time within the city within a matter of moments. Those businesses that don’t have a plan for such conditions find out about them at the end of the day when they’re impacting their bookings.
All these factors are common to each and every operator and equally impact all vehicles on the Dubai roads. The difference is that any company can be without them, although a reliable company in Dubai will not, but it is the way they plan in advance for them.
While having good drivers is important, it’s not all about that and punctuality at scale isn’t an accident. It’s a by-product of certain operating systems, which are thoughtfully designed and developed.
Professional dispatch doesn’t determine when the client must arrive at the same time. It adds a buffer as well, representing a more reasonable level of traffic congestion on that route during that time of day, so that if the traffic is a bit busier than anticipated, for example, it doesn’t result in an actual delay. This buffer is not a best estimate by the driver of the time he thinks it will take, but rather is based on what he has learned from travel over the years.
Modern fleet management involves being able to know where each and every vehicle is at any given moment and adapting plans as soon as things begin to fall behind schedule. If, for example, one route suddenly gets held up unnecessarily, an operation that is well run can alert the customer in advance of the delay, or let a driver know, rather than everyone getting the bad news afterwards.
The same goes for airport transfers if the airport is not listed with an approximate time of arrival but the actual flight number the pick up schedule is automatically updated if the flight is delayed or canceled. One technology component can eradicate one of the top reasons for wasted driver time and failure to pick up on time—landing too early or too late.
Judgement that only a dozen or two dozen times a day a dozens-of-routines chauffeur can provide: Where is this particular hotel in the direction you’re headed? Which time of the day is the fastest? What street is the unknown jam on? If a new driver would lose two minutes on a blind shot, where would he park for that time? This is a true skill and the chauffeur or driving school teaches the driver the skills that you will need to use when driving since the average licensed driver does not possess the same skills as the chauffeur.
Plans can go awry even for the most well laid out schedule, and there can be a true mechanical problem or an unknown complication that comes up. A well-equipped fleet is able to have a replacement vehicle and driver on the scene to promptly replace the driver without leaving the client stranded while a single point of failure is addressed. It’s redundant, costly and it’s a feature that only those concerned about the reliability of the system would have a problem with.
The separate contribution of each of the above systems to punctuality should not be confused with the contribution each of the operational systems makes and it may be worth separating them out.
A professional chauffeur doesn’t just check traffic conditions at a certain time of leaving, he does so before the leave, at the set time and even before, that is in advance, not after. They report to dispatch any unusual incidents they come across on the way, if a closure or unexpected congestion occurs, so the wider system can adjust if necessary, rather than the driver taking it in stride and hoping that it is all right. However, if there is a change, they inform the client of the change and they then, critically, explain the reason for the two minute delay directly to the client – which would have a totally different impression than if they did not find out about the change until looking at the clock and wondering where the car was.
This communication is proactive rather it is the fruit of timeliness. If you know that the train will be 5 minutes late, you would have been given the information before you went to the station and, therefore, it would be different to the case where you had been informed by the train that it would be 5 minutes late.
There’s an important point to make here: This analogy applies to the case of app-based ride hailing, which is a service with the same problems, but a different price point. They aren’t, they simply don’t.
Application connects you with driver, the nearest one at the call time. This is actually helpful when doing a spontaneous trip that isn’t a big deal if they take a few minutes longer or a few minutes shorter. It’s not a pre-booked limousine in which the entire point is a specific commitment made prior to the event that’s backed by a company with dispatch systems, buffers in place and a guarantee that nothing goes wrong.
This is another form of what “surge pricing” will be during high demand, where an app is responding to the demand, and with the pre-booked service, it will always be available regardless of demand. This trade off is usually quite acceptable if you’re on a casual trip. It’s a different and more hazardous wager for a wedding, significant flight or a customer pickup where the consequence of being late is truly significant.
However, to be certain of a company’s reliability on their time you must know how to do so before you book. If you are considering hiring a company, you should learn how to determine the company’s punctuality before you book.
Punctuality is only apparent when it is actually there, not when it isn’t, so you can only judge punctuality when you ask a pertinent question and not just take the marketing jargon at face value.
How does the car hire with driver company manage to get buffer time in the scheduling process? Inquire if the airport pickups are based on a real-time flight track or based on the estimated time that is manually entered when booking. Talk about how to deal with being late, back-up plan, and does the company just shrug it off later. Inquire about training in respect of route knowledge rather than general driving skills. These are all baseless questions that do not interrupt the dialog and a well-established system should be able to address them in a clear and concise manner without being defensive.
Additionally, the communication of a company in their booking process, should be taken into account. When a company can be sure of the details, it follows up proactively and is clear on responses, it is the same on the road that will make or break the appearance of your car later.
This is an abstract concept to be quantified. Those rebooking fees will be hundreds of dollars and do not include the time change at their destination, missed dates and appointments, missed connecting flights, missed hotel check-in or the time change related to the original flight. Not only the not-so-priceless expense of a hectic rushed beginning to what was meant to be a relaxing day, yet the vendor overtime expenses when a reception overshoots the booked venue window time. In the event of a large client meeting, lateness can have dire consequences: in the worst case scenario, it can result in irreparable damage to the business relationship that can never be remedied by a great meeting after the show.
So all of these are real costs, but none of them are on the invoice for a customer to pay for when the limousine is hired on a specific day, and it doesn’t actually cause any trouble for that customer, but a truly reliable bus rental Dubai service would be saving the customer those costs. The importance of reliability becomes abundantly clear only when it actually matters, on that one day it is tested.
In reality, in the past few years, tools to solve this problem have gotten better and, in fact, companies that have adopted them as their actual tools for problem-solving can prove it. Predictive traffic modeling which is based on traffic patterns and not only traffic conditions helps dispatch predict congestion based on conditions that have occurred in the past, without having to wait for congestion to show up on a live map. It might be that we can’t go a day without flight tracking anymore, and if it isn’t available, it’s a red flag and not just a nice to have. Centralized fleet management dashboards also enable a dispatch team to keep an eye on every booking for a whole day before a problem develops on one route and turns into a missed pickup.
The best of all of this technology is no substitute for the basics, buffer planning, driver training, backup capacity, but this technology makes those things much easier to do on a scale large enough and daily enough to make a company reliable on a good day what it’s supposed to be on every day.
Dubai’s peak hours will be the most difficult times for being on time. The “cooler” months (October to March) are also extremely busy with more bookings being made on weekends and the fleets are working as hard as they can at the most expensive time of the year for the delay. The peaks are similar when there are events like a large conference, a global sporting event, a national holiday weekend, etc. and they happen at certain times and locations.
These changes are just passed on to a company with a robust fleet capacity and well managed dispatch system and won’t be felt in the service provision. Then, cracks begin to show in the operation of a company because backup vehicles are already in service on another day, buffer times are already too short and a company’s normal day performance compared to its peak day performance is a true litmus test of how seriously they take punctuality, rather than picking up on an off-peak day.
This is one of the reasons it is advisable to make your booking early in the busy seasons so you not only get the car you need, but you also won’t end up being disappointed with the unexpected car. It’s about making time for your well run operation to get the right booking in your already full day schedule, rather than it being an afterthought.
But one good day of experience is not to be judged as a good business, as any business has its good days and bad. Patterns show proof of a genuine history of on-time service, rain, traffic, day of the week, time of day it doesn’t matter.
The aspect of the service that’s the most difficult to consistently “act” and is most likely to be noted in a review is punctuality. A firm that will talk about the times when it has gone wrong, and what they did about it, is more likely to be reliable than a firm that can only say it’s been perfect all the time.
If you are looking for more than scheduling systems, we have written more generally about what it takes to be a good chauffeur for work as it relates to reliability, training etc. If you are a particular one thinking about this choice for a wedding day, our wedding limousine service will clarify that these are types of planning carried out on the very same timetable described above. In the business world, where reliability can be measured, our corporate chauffeur service is created to meet that requirement, and, in a corporate world where there is no one-off requirement for reliability, we have one that can.
Not a fixed number but instead is dependent on historical data relating to traffic on that route at that time.
Yes, significantly. Eliminates the number one most frequent cause of airport pickups problems a flight landing ahead of schedule or behind schedule from the time of booking.
It is not always the case and price is no assurance of operational discipline. Do not rely on the price to be a measure of reliability, ask the question: What is your scheduling system and your back-up plan?
Call the company’s dispatch department directly, not the driver since dispatch can provide information about what other service the company can provide the driver may not be able to provide on his own such as a backup vehicle.
These work well for “true” low impact travel. A flight, a marriage, a meeting, a service that has been booked and where the dispatch system is accountable in some way are more reliable choices, as lateness is a true cost if it’s a requirement.
Waiting an hour for a professional limousine service isn’t a nice thing to say about the ‘about page’ of a company, nor is it a nice idea. It happens because it’s planned, tracked in real time, scheduled with flights, programmed for the city’s traffic, weather and even events calendar, and automatically backed up if it doesn’t really happen, a passenger’s schedule does. It’s a serious business that those companies that take it seriously are doing a real business. When it’s a really important event that you can’t miss like a flight, a wedding day, a client appointment, a date or one that you can’t recreate this question is not “what kind of car will I be letting” but rather just how sure can you be that it will show up on time?
White Line Limousine LLC focus and concentration on punctuality extends beyond marketing as it is a key part of scheduling, training their chauffeurs and planning their fleet. The company’s attitude to punctuality is on par with everyone’s booking. Book your wedding, business or airport transfer with us today.
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