Every summer a large number of families arrive in London for weeks or months at a time, take a house or a suite in Mayfair, Knightsbridge, Belgravia or Chelsea, and then need to move around a city that is at its busiest. School has finished, the diary is full of appointments, shopping, lunches and days out, and there is usually more than one generation travelling, with staff.
Booking that journey by journey is exhausting for whoever is managing it, and it produces a different driver every time, which is the opposite of what a family wants. So the usual arrangement here is a chauffeur assigned to the family by the week or the month, with the same car, working to a pattern the family sets rather than a fixed list of jobs.
In practice that means the chauffeur learns the things nobody writes down. Which entrance the building uses, where the car can wait on that street, who needs a child seat and who will not sit in one, which grandparent prefers the front, which appointments never run to time, and that Thursdays are long. By the second week the family stops thinking about transport, which is the point of the whole exercise.
