Glossary · Bookings
Wait time
Updated
Wait time is the gap between the chauffeur arriving and the passenger getting in, measured after a grace period that is commonly 15 minutes on a residential or office pickup and 30 to 60 minutes after landing at an airport. Beyond the grace, many operators bill in 15-minute blocks at a fraction of the hourly rate.
The grace period exists because the trade sells punctuality. The chauffeur is early by design, and the first quarter hour is the cost of being early. After that, the car is doing a second job (waiting) that stops it doing the next one (the 9:30 pickup across town). Wait time is the charge that makes the customer's lateness their cost rather than the operator's.
Airport wait is its own case. The grace runs from the actual landing, not the scheduled one, which is why flight verification matters: a 40-minute delay is not billable wait if the chauffeur knew and arrived later. The common mistake is billing wait from the scheduled pickup on a delayed flight, which starts an argument the operator loses.
How liverybook handles it
Wait time charge is a component of the leg total, alongside base rate, gratuity, tolls, parking and extras, less discount, and it feeds the invoice line as the leg completes. The arrived_pickup and passenger_on_board transitions are each written to the append-only event log, so the wait on any leg can be read from the log rather than from memory. Grace periods and block rates are the operator's convention, set in the rate. See bookings.
Related terms
This term lives in Bookings. liverybook is the operating system for ground transportation.