Outstation

An outstation trip is any journey that takes the vehicle out of its home city overnight or for a full working day, and it is billed on a different basis from a local hire for a reason that is easy to miss. The vehicle and the chauffeur are committed to you for the duration. Even on a day when you travel almost nowhere, that vehicle is not earning anywhere else and that driver is not home. This is what the daily minimum kilometre figure represents: not a distance you are obliged to travel, but the floor below which a day cannot be priced.

Most people meet the minimum without trying. A run between two South Indian cities of any consequence clears it on the outbound leg alone. Where it bites is the middle day of a longer trip, the one spent entirely at a hill station with the vehicle parked. That day still bills at the minimum, and knowing this in advance is the difference between a fair arrangement and a surprise. Where a trip has several such days, say so when you book and we will structure it as an itinerary rather than a sequence of unrelated days.

Return kilometres are part of the arithmetic on a round trip, which surprises people who expect to pay only for the distance they personally sit through. The vehicle has to come home. On a round trip this is invisible, because the return leg is a leg you are travelling anyway. It becomes visible only on a one-way journey, which is why we price that as a separate product rather than pretending the vehicle teleports back.

The driver needs to sleep, and where he sleeps is worth settling before departure rather than at eleven at night in an unfamiliar town. On most multi-day trips the hotel provides driver accommodation, sometimes at a nominal charge and sometimes free; on some it does not, and the cost falls to the trip. Ask your hotel at the booking stage. A driver who has slept badly for three consecutive nights on a reclined front seat is not the person you want on a ghat road on day four, and no rate card makes that acceptable.

Night running is charged separately. Driving between late evening and early morning is harder, more dangerous and paid accordingly, and the window is stated plainly rather than left to interpretation. If your itinerary involves a pre-dawn departure to reach a temple for a particular darshan, or a late arrival after a wedding, that is entirely normal and we will plan for it. What we will not do is quietly absorb it into a day rate and then argue about it afterwards.

Tolls, inter-state permits and parking are billed at cost. South India's state borders each have their own permit arrangement, and a route crossing two of them costs more than a route staying inside one. Where a route is known to us we will tell you which permits apply before you commit.