Contract work with hotels and companies
Less visible than street work, steadier, and almost always the piece that holds the rest up.
Jobs that come from a hotel, a practice or a company have something street work does not: they repeat, they can be planned and they can be invoiced. It is not a side channel, it is what fills the hours when the phone does not ring.
What a hotel is actually buying
It is not buying the lowest price. It is buying not having to think about it: that the car is there at five in the morning, that the driver knows where to pull in, that the guest does not come back to the desk to complain. If you turn up with a discount instead of with reliability, you are selling the wrong thing.
The three questions to settle before signing
- 01Who pays: the passenger in the car, or the customer at the end of the month on an invoice.
- 02The price: a rate per mile, or a fixed price on the runs that repeat.
- 03Who answers if something goes wrong, and on what number.
The first is the most important and the most neglected. If the job is on account and the driver asks for money in the car, the embarrassment comes back to the hotel and the hotel remembers it for months. The driver has to know before setting off, in words and not as a symbol.
Fixed prices on the runs that repeat
Hotel to airport, hotel to station, hotel to the exhibition centre: they are always the same and they are worth putting on a fixed price. The customer knows what they are spending, you know what you are taking, and nobody argues about the traffic. Write down what happens when the flight is late and what waiting costs, too: it is the only thing anybody ends up arguing about.