How we operate
Five things you can check, instead of five things we could claim
Most taxi websites compete on adjectives. This page lists the mechanisms — how the price is set, how a driver is cleared for a job, and what happens to the record afterwards.
The numbers we actually have
Four figures, each one checkable
You will not find a star rating or an annual passenger count here. We have not collected either in a form we could stand behind, so publishing one would be inventing it.
- Years trading in Colchester
- 18
- Destinations with a published fare
- 8
- Lowest all-in saloon fare
- £81.50
- Office answered, every day
- 24h
One — the price
The fare is a published number, not a calculation
Our fares are a list. A saloon to Stansted is £81.50, an estate or MPV is £101.50. Those numbers are looked up, not derived, and they are the same number you pay.
That sounds unremarkable until you see the alternative. A pricing engine that calculates from a per-mile rate has to reproduce a table whose MPV-to-saloon ratio swings between 1.06 and 1.26 across destinations. No formula does that. One tried, and quoted an MPV to Stansted at £151 against a published £100.
The other half of it: your browser never sends us a price. It sends where you are going, and the server returns a reference. The amount charged is read back from our own record, so there is no figure in the page for anyone to edit.
Two — what is added at the end
Nothing is added at the end
No card handling fee, no fuel surcharge, no peak multiplier. The only addition to a published fare is the £1.50 booking fee, and the quote you are shown already includes it.
We are not being generous. Charging consumers extra for paying by debit or credit card has been unlawful in the UK since 13 January 2018, whatever the fee is called on the receipt. Any firm still adding £3 for a card is not offering you a service, they are breaking a rule that has been in force for years.
Where a genuine extra exists it is named before you book — a child seat, for example — and it appears on the booking, not on the doorstep.
No card fee
Unlawful since January 2018. Folded into the fare instead.
One booking fee, shown up front
£1.50 per booking, the same whichever way you pay, and inside the total you are quoted.
No surge
A 04:00 airport run costs what the list says it costs.
No estimate
If a route has no published fare, we quote it rather than guess.
Three — who turns up
A driver whose badge expires before your journey cannot be given it
Every operator is supposed to know that the driver on a job is licensed, and that the car is plated, tested and insured. The usual method is a spreadsheet somebody reviews monthly.
Here it is a condition of the booking. When a job is assigned, the system checks the driver’s private hire badge and DVLA licence, and the vehicle’s plate, MOT and insurance, against the date you travel — not against today. A badge that is valid this morning but lapses before next Tuesday’s 04:00 run is not valid for that run, and the assignment is refused outright.
It also checks the car can carry you: a booking for six people cannot be given to a four-seat saloon, and a booking needing a wheelchair-accessible vehicle cannot be given to one that is not.
Four — the record
The booking record cannot be edited after the fact
Colchester’s operator licence requires a booking record that cannot be backdated. In this system that is a property of the database, not a promise: the tables holding the journey history and the audit trail discard any attempt to update or delete a row. Not “log and alert” — discard.
Every state change carries who made it and when, in sequence: assigned, en route, arrived, on board, completed. A refused action is recorded too, because an attempt someone was not allowed to make is worth knowing about.
The practical version: if there is ever a dispute about what time a car was booked for, the answer exists and nobody can have altered it.
Five — what is missing
The things this site refuses to say
An unusual thing to advertise, but the absences are deliberate and each one has a reason.
No testimonials
We have not connected verified reviews yet, so there are none on the site. Inventing them has been a banned practice under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act since April 2025 — and the database will not store a review that is not tied to a real completed booking or a synced external source.
No statistics
No trip counts, no satisfaction percentage, no star rating. We do not hold those figures in a form worth publishing, and a number nobody can check is decoration.
No unconfirmed extras
Flight monitoring, meet-and-greet, waiting allowances and wheelchair-accessible availability are not advertised until the office confirms exactly what is offered. Ask, and you get the real answer.
When verified reviews are connected they will appear on the reviews page unedited, including the unflattering ones.
Check the price before you decide anything
Published fares to eight destinations, from £81.50 in a saloon. No card fee, and the figure you are quoted is the figure charged.