Urbania Rental

Chauffeur-driven means exactly that, and it is worth being plain about it because the phrase gets used loosely. You do not drive the Urbania and you are not offered the keys. A driver who works these roads for a living drives it, and that is the only way we hire the vehicle out. We have no self-drive product and no plans for one. A twenty-two foot van on a South Indian highway, loaded with your family and their luggage, is not a vehicle anyone should meet for the first time on the morning of a trip.

What you are buying, then, is a vehicle and the person driving it as a single unit. The chauffeur handles the parking hunt at a crowded temple, the hairpins on a ghat road that a first-timer takes far too fast, the negotiation at a check post, and the question of where a twenty-two foot vehicle can actually turn around. None of that appears on an invoice, and all of it is the difference between a journey that works and one that becomes an argument. It is also why the driver's daily allowance is billed as its own line rather than folded into the kilometre rate: it pays a person, not a vehicle.

Hire runs by the day or by the trip, and the two are billed differently. A local day is a package of hours and kilometres, and the meter of interest is the clock. An outstation trip is billed per kilometre against a daily minimum, and the meter of interest is the odometer. Neither is a better deal in the abstract. A day of short hops around one city burns hours and almost no distance; a straight run to another state burns distance and almost no hours. Tell us which shape your day is and the right structure is usually obvious in a sentence.

The seater is matched to your group rather than to whatever happens to be free that morning, and we would rather have the argument at the booking stage than at the kerb. Two numbers decide it: how many people, and how many bags. The second is the one people forget, and it is the one that sinks trips. A group that fits comfortably on paper can still be a group whose luggage does not, and the honest answer in that case is a larger seater rather than a cheerful assurance that it will all somehow go in. We publish seating as passengers plus the chauffeur so the arithmetic is never ambiguous.

Rates start from a per-kilometre figure that varies by seater, with the driver's allowance, tolls, parking, permits and GST added on top. There is no version of this where a number quoted on a website is the final bill, because tolls and permits depend on the roads you actually take. What we can promise is that every component is named before you book, and that nothing appears on the invoice that was not discussed.