No-Shows Explained: When a Booking Counts as Used

A booking is only treated as a no-show if the free waiting window has run out, you haven't appeared, and you haven't answered your phone. All three have to be true together — a late arrival on its own, or a phone that rings once and gets missed, doesn't tip a booking into no-show territory by itself.

The waiting window itself is generous specifically because passport queues and baggage delays are common and expected, not because a driver is being lenient. It starts only once your driver confirms arrival at the pickup, and on airport pickups your pickup time already follows your flight's actual landing — so a delayed flight hasn't used up any of that window before you've even reached arrivals.

Before pickup you're sent the driver's name, phone number and licence plate specifically so a mismatch — wrong terminal, wrong pickup point, a queue that's taking longer than expected — is something you can resolve with a phone call rather than something that silently runs out the clock. If you think you might be later than expected, calling the number you were sent is the single most useful thing you can do.

The situation the policy is actually guarding against is someone who simply doesn't turn up at all and can't be reached — a booking made and then abandoned with no contact. That's the scenario where the fare isn't refunded, because a driver and a car were sent and held for the full waiting window with no way to reach the passenger.

The details of the no-show policy exist to describe an edge case that's genuinely rare in practice, because it depends on nobody being reachable at all — not a driver being unlucky, not a passenger being ten minutes late. Staying reachable on the number you booked with, and calling the driver's number if anything about the pickup feels off, is what keeps this policy from ever coming into play on an ordinary trip.