A ground transport policy checklist for Ontario travel desks

Most ground transport policies are written after something went wrong. A director stood at an unlit loading bay at 23:00, or an invoice arrived with forty unexplained lines on it, and somebody was asked to make sure it did not happen again. The result is usually a page of rules about vehicle classes and a silence where the important clauses should be. This checklist is the shape of the policy we are most often asked to comply with, and it is the one we think actually protects a traveller.

Start from what the policy has to prove

Duty of care, in practice, is a documentation problem. If something goes wrong, the questions are always the same: who was in which vehicle, who was driving it, who knew, and who answered. A policy that can produce those four answers for any trip in the last two years is doing its job. A policy that specifies leather upholstery and says nothing about escalation is decoration.

Write the policy so that a stranger can reconstruct any single trip from the paperwork alone.

The clauses worth arguing about

1. 01Identification before the pickup. The traveller receives the chauffeur’s name, the vehicle and the plate before the car arrives, and the arranger can be copied on the same message. Nobody is asked to get into an unidentified car at an airport.
2. 02A human being on the phone at 03:00. Not an app, not a ticket queue: a dispatcher who can see the booking. Ours answers on +1 (905) 555-0142 around the clock.
3. 03One named escalation path. Your dispatcher first, a named manager behind them, both named when the account opens rather than during the incident.
4. 04Arrival confirmation to the arranger for lone travellers and late-night runs. This is the single clause most travel policies care about and the one most often left out of the supplier agreement.
5. 05Waiting time stated in minutes, not adjectives. Sixty minutes from touchdown on commercial arrivals and thirty from wheels-down on private aviation, then a published rate in fifteen-minute increments.
6. 06Cancellation windows in writing. Change any detail free of charge up to 4 hours before pickup on sedans and SUVs, or 24 hours on the Sprinter and the stretch. Inside those windows a cancellation is charged at 50% of the fare. Ours are set out in the published terms rather than quoted on request.
7. 07Cost-centre or matter codes captured at booking and carried to the invoice line without being retyped by anybody.
8. 08A fare that does not move with traffic, so an approval given on Monday is still true on Thursday.
9. 09A written trail per trip: booking, confirmation, any change to the pickup, and completion, all against one reference.
10. 10A clear answer on what the supplier does in a storm, before the pickup rather than after it.

What to ask a supplier for, clause by clause

Billing clauses that save a controller a day a month

Write the invoice into the policy, not just the fare. On a corporate account trips are collected across the calendar month and invoiced once, and each line carries the date, the passenger, the route, the vehicle class, the chauffeur and your own cost-centre code. HST at 13% sits on its own line and every figure is in Canadian dollars. The test of a good statement is whether a controller can reconcile a line without telephoning anyone, and the test of a good supplier is whether a disputed line is held off the payment run while it is looked at rather than paid under protest.

It is worth saying plainly in the policy that no card is held on file and nothing is charged through a website. That single sentence closes several procurement questions at once.

Vehicle rules that survive contact with reality

Most policies write vehicle class as a seniority rule and then watch it fail at the kerb, because the real constraint is luggage rather than rank. Three passengers with three cases fit an executive sedan such as the Mercedes-Benz S-Class. The fourth passenger, or the fourth case, makes it an SUV: a Cadillac Escalade ESV takes six people and six cases. A visiting team of nine with display materials is a Sprinter Executive and not three sedans, which is also the cheaper answer. Write the rule as party plus luggage and it will hold.

Where the policy meets the map

A policy written for head office travels badly. Ours is priced at fixed fares across twelve service areas, so a run from Toronto to Pearson and a run from a plant in Brampton are both approvable numbers rather than estimates. Anything beyond those areas — a client site in Kitchener, a plant north of Barrie — is quoted as a fixed charter before the car moves. Name that mechanism in the policy so nobody has to invent one at 16:00 on a Friday.

Approval thresholds people will actually follow

Set the threshold against the trip type rather than the dollar figure. Airport transfers and single point-to-point runs go straight through on a code. Anything multi-car, anything crossing the border, and anything held by the hour goes to one named approver. That is three rules, which is about the number a busy assistant will remember at 06:00, and it puts the approval where the money actually moves: a roadshow with four cars costs more than a month of sedans.

Review it against a real month

Once a year, take a single month’s statement and audit it against the policy as written. Pull three trips at random and see whether you can reconstruct each one: who travelled, who drove, what changed, what it cost and against which code. If you can, the policy is doing its work. If you cannot, the gap will be in one of the ten clauses above.

If it is useful, send us your draft. We would rather answer a procurement question honestly before an account opens than discover a clause we cannot meet in the middle of a board visit. Write to reservations@northcrestexecutivelimos.com, or ask for account terms and a named dispatcher comes back with rates by vehicle class.