New Year, same old situation

With 2022 well underway we have been hit with a case of Covid, forced isolation, and a driver undergoing an unrelated operation…and we thought we led a charmed life! However, we can draw upon a pool of excellent, licensed, and trusted sub-contractors to undertake our bookings so business is unaffected. A condition of us passing work to them is that they promise to take daily Lateral Flow Tests and keep on using masks and disinfecting their cars regularly.

Haslemere Independent Taxis saw a Holiday Season spike in airport trips as lucky customers escaped to the sun or the ski slopes, but understandably everyone seems to be holding off on foreign holiday bookings. The majority of our customers are now hunkering down in the cold, bleak January as they pay off credit cards and breathe a sigh of relief that the pressures of Christmas and New Year are done for another 12 months. The phone is quiet and online bookings are almost non-existent, but we expect this anyway, so are getting plenty of sleep in readiness for the madness of the April through October season, when weddings, parties, and holiday airport runs resume.

The Haslemere area taxi situation has been forever altered by the Covid situation, with the departure of drivers for more regular pay and working hours, resulting in the unavailability of cars for early local trips and short taxi journeys to Haslemere station. We are spread much more thinly than pre-March 2020 but have put in place systems to request cover from other local companies, such as our sister company Silverline Taxis of Haslemere. The loss of a central phone operator has been difficult to manage as the calls are now routed to just two drivers, who are forced to take bookings whilst on the road. We do make the odd mistake in registering these requests - we are only human!- and so ask customers to reconnect with us to confirm all is in place. With all these added pressures we believe our punctuality, friendliness, and helpfulness have not been affected, but are always glad to receive feedback from you as to how we can improve.

The meter rate, set by Waverley Council. has not been altered in, I believe, about 12 or 13 years, even as the cost of living has rocketed, which has definitely put most of us off taking small local jobs. Very often the cost of getting to the customer, with the ‘dead’ mileage this incurs, makes the trip pointless from a financial point of view. The public regards us as a service to be on hand for all their needs, but in fact we are a business and as such are unsubsidised, unlike buses, who can drive around their routes with one or two passengers and still remain viable. With the huge increase in fuel and insurance costs, as well as home energy, food and everything else, we have been forced to raise our charges for trips which either start or finish outside of the Waverley area, which includes the airports, London and long-distance taxi trips from Haslemere and the surrounding villages and towns,- which not everyone appreciates is fair or necessary. By and large, the public does not appreciate just how many hours in the week a driver must work to earn a very average income- currently, we average 60 to 70 in November through March and then up to 110 in the busy season! This increase has not been helped by Heathrow and Gatwick introducing a £5 drop-off charge which the customer must pay to us and is then automatically taken from our registered airport account. The Mayor of London has decided to keep the Congestion Charge at a whopping £15 for every trip, no matter the hour or day, but thankfully all our vehicles are ULEZ compliant so we avoid that £15 charge.

2022 sees no let-up in the difficulty of running a small local business and I can see that the world as we knew it will never return. However, we are sincerely thankful and deeply grateful to our customers for keeping us going and providing us with a living and hope to grow in the months ahead. I appreciate that we are healthy (ish!) and are much better off than many.

Please continue to be very cautious and rigorous with your Covid safety and I and my team look forward to driving you in happier, warmer times.