Glossary · Dispatch
Chauffeur
Updated
In this trade the person behind the wheel is a chauffeur, not a driver, and the distinction is about standard rather than vocabulary: suit, name sign, door held, luggage handled, vehicle detailed before every pickup. A chauffeur is typically on site 10 to 15 minutes before the scheduled pickup, and that early arrival is what the customer is paying for.
Operators staff chauffeurs three ways: W-2 employees, independent contractors driving their own vehicles under the operator's authority, and affiliate drivers running farm-outs. Each has a different pay structure (hourly, percentage of the fare, or a net rate per trip) and a different set of compliance paperwork.
The chauffeur is also the operator's only eyes on the trip. The dispatcher knows what the chauffeur reports: arrived, passenger on board, dropped. The common mistake is a chauffeur who runs the job perfectly and reports nothing, leaving the office to guess whether the 8:00 is still waiting at baggage claim.
How liverybook handles it
Chauffeurs are driver records in the fleet module, assigned to a trip from the inline driver select on the run board, where the available drivers stat card shows who is free. Drivers are never office seats, so a 30-chauffeur fleet pays for its dispatchers and bookkeeper, not its drivers. Today the dispatcher sets status for the operator's own chauffeurs from the board; affiliate drivers on farm-outs update their own status through a tokenised link. A driver app is on the roadmap.
Related terms
This term lives in Dispatch. liverybook is the operating system for ground transportation.