Art Basel 2027. A small Swiss city with the world's art market inside it for one week.

In fair week Basel is comprehensively outnumbered by its own event. Tens of thousands of visitors arrive for four public days, preceded by preview days that draw the collectors, the advisers and the institutional buyers. Hotel rooms in the city are taken a long way in advance and at the peak many visitors are not staying in Basel at all: they stay in Zurich, in the surrounding Swiss and German countryside, or across the French and German borders, and travel in.

That changes the shape of the transport plan completely. Instead of short hops within a compact city, you have a daily commute of forty minutes to an hour and a quarter in each direction, on roads that cross two international borders in some cases, timed against appointments that were agreed weeks earlier and cannot slip. A driver who waits rather than a series of separate journeys is almost always the right answer here. Cars in Switzerland, France and Germany are arranged through operators we know. The car to your private terminal in London is ours, with our own chauffeur.

EuroAirport Basel Mulhouse Freiburg is a genuine oddity: a single airport operated jointly by France and Switzerland, on French soil, with a customs road that takes you directly into Switzerland. For business aviation it is well served, with established handling and maintenance operations on the field including Jet Aviation, AMAC, Swissport and Air Service Basel. Every aircraft that intends to park must have a ground handling agent appointed, ground manoeuvring support is required for general aviation flights that are not based there, and prior permission is required for non based flights wanting a stand on the main apron, with a day's notice as the minimum.

In the week of the fair the constraint, as always, is parking rather than runway. Aprons fill, and the honest expectation for some aircraft is that they drop passengers and reposition, returning for the departure. Settle parking and the departure slot at the same time as the aircraft. Zurich is the standard alternative: it is about an hour away by road in normal conditions, and the direct train from Zurich to Basel takes roughly an hour, which is a perfectly civilised way to make the journey if the traffic is against you. See private jet charter, Zurich and midsize jets.

Most of the difficulty in this week falls on an assistant or a chief of staff rather than on the person travelling. Principals arrive from different cities on different days, guests are invited and then change their minds, and a private dinner on the Wednesday needs eight cars that are not all coming from the same place. The useful thing is a single itinerary held by one person who knows where every vehicle is and can move them without a fresh conversation each time.

That is how we work: one contact, one written plan, and changes taken by telephone or message at any hour. For a corporate or family office group travelling to several events across the year, an account makes this simpler still. See travel management, family offices and private banks.