January is horrific – additional reading to understand why the weather is so bad at this time of year. February isn’t much better. By March, anyone who commutes from Norwich to work has probably experienced some sort of transport breakdown. The apps don’t work well in poor weather. Cabbies refuse to do out-of-town pickups. The cars that do arrive are not winterized. For a county where winter mornings are dark, wet and sometimes icy, this failure mode is all too common.
A driver doesn’t cancel on the basis of the weather. The booking stands regardless. The fact that the service doesn’t change in the bad months is, in fact, a powerful selling point – one that is rarely mentioned.
Summer brings its own complications. July and August are different months in Norfolk. The A149 is congested with seaside traffic. Norwich has events that shrink the city’s road network. A driver who knows these patterns by heart, rather than learning them en route, ensures your schedule is met when a non-local driver can’t.
Business travel is year-round and aseasonal. The food industry executive travelling to Rotterdam in February. The law partner to London in October. The NHS executive heading to Birmingham in April. Their plans don’t factor in the unreliability of Norfolk’s transport system. The support is a good chauffeur account, in the background, buffering the variability.
The social market is a busy place. November and December are full of Christmas parties in Norfolk restaurants and hotels. Marriage season – May to September – needs transport to the county’s venues that can handle the countryside. New Year’s Eve is the most popular night of the year, for obvious reasons.
“We get ours in September for December,” a regular Norwich family said. “If we don’t, we can’t.”
That’s a symptom of something. There’s more demand for professional chauffeur hire in Norfolk than supply on important dates. Those who have tried it once make arrangements because they don’t want to go without.
Chauffeur hire works in Norwich because the demand is steady, the geography is challenging and the business community is small enough for word to get around. Season changes. That need doesn’t.