It is a fair question in an era when anybody with a phone can navigate anywhere. If the route is simply what the screen says, the argument goes, then preparation adds nothing. That would be true if journeys consisted only of the middle bit, which is the part navigation genuinely does well.
They do not. The difficult parts of any journey are the first two minutes and the last five, and no navigation application has ever known which of a building's four entrances is in use, whether the gates close at seven, or that the drive is too narrow for two cars to pass. That is where advance work earns its place.
What is checked before the collection
A chauffeur reviews the journey before setting off, not on arrival. That means confirming the addresses actually exist as given, looking at the approach to each, identifying where the car can legally stop, and checking for roadworks, events or closures affecting the day. Where a venue is unfamiliar or rural, that check is more careful, because unfamiliar and rural is where journeys go wrong.
Timing is planned alongside the route rather than after it. The same eight miles behaves completely differently at seven in the morning and at four in the afternoon, so departure is set against the hour rather than against the distance. Where an appointment is immovable, the whole plan is built backwards from it with margin deliberately included. The margin is what absorbs the incident nobody could have anticipated.
Navigation as a tool, not a plan
Live navigation is used, and it is genuinely good at what it does: reacting to an incident that appeared ten minutes ago and finding a way around it. No amount of preparation substitutes for that. The two work together, with the prepared route giving the chauffeur a view of what a suggested diversion actually costs before accepting it blindly. Preparation tells you what normal looks like.
That judgement is the part a screen cannot supply. An application offering four minutes saved through a residential area with speed tables and school traffic is not offering four minutes. A chauffeur who knows the area weighs the suggestion rather than obeying it, and quietly rejects the ones that will make the cabin less comfortable for no real gain. You are unlikely ever to notice the decision.
- The exact entrance to be used at large buildings and terminals
- Legal set-down and waiting options close to each address
- Barriers, gates, height restrictions and access codes
- Roadworks, closures and events affecting the day
- Charging and emission zones along the intended route
- A sensible alternative approach if the primary one is blocked
Where local knowledge actually shows
In cities, it shows in the small decisions: which side of a square to approach from, which hotel forecourt is workable at eight in the morning, where a car can legally sit for ten minutes near a building with no forecourt at all. These are not navigable facts. They are learned by driving the same streets repeatedly and they save minutes at exactly the moments minutes matter.
You can improve the preparation considerably yourself. Tell us the entrance you will use, the name of the venue rather than only its postcode, any access code or gate arrangement, and whether anything about the address is unusual. Rural postcodes in particular can cover a wide area, and a what3words reference or a landmark removes the guesswork entirely. Two minutes there is rarely wasted.
