If you ask anyone who regularly travels from Norwich Airport about their worst travel experience – recommended reading if you want to see how others avoid these problems – they will tell you about their experience with taxis. It’s not the flight. It’s the hour before. Taxis cancel. Apps glitch. Drivers accept a ride and then disappear. For a trip to the shops, no problem – you deal with it. But for a 6am flight to Amsterdam, connecting to a flight, and a client presentation on the laptop? There’s no room for error.

That’s where chauffeur drivers come in.

A good chauffeur driver doesn’t take your booking as an invitation. They call the night before. If you’re being picked up, they monitor your flight. If there’s roadworks on the M11, they know and have left. This is no pretentious service – just good logistics.

Norwich is a real business centre. Insurance, law, food manufacturers with European distribution networks – these industries are always on the move. A finance director travelling from Glasgow to Norwich doesn’t want to have to tell the driver where the airport is. They want to be met, the door open, the route planned. Simple.

The social aspect gets lost in all this. Demand for wedding chauffeur hire in Norfolk has been increasing because the county’s most popular wedding venues are located in places where Google Maps and country roads don’t always get on. A driver who has picked up 20 wedding parties from that barn knows where to park so you’re not in a paddock. That’s earned knowledge. It matters.

Hen parties. Milestone birthdays. Corporate away-days. Country weddings. There are many events – and they all have one thing in common. No-one wants transport to be the elephant in the room.

Price is no lie. Chauffeur services charge more. You are paying for the service, the drivers and the cars to be there when you want them to be there, no matter the weather or surge pricing, and for the cars to be clean and the air con to work.

Norwich commuters do the maths. Reliability has a price. So does arriving at an important meeting stressed, late and angry at a company.

Most people find the maths don’t add up.