Booking for someone else

How booking for someone else works

A good proportion of birthday bookings are made by somebody other than the driver, and the mechanics are simple as long as you know them in advance. You can arrange the hire, choose the car and pay for all of it. What you cannot do is sign for it — the person actually driving has to be on the agreement, has to pass the same licence check, and has to be within the age limits for that specific car.

That last point is where surprises come apart. If you have booked a GT3 for someone who turns out to be twenty-four, or who has held a full licence for eighteen months, we cannot release the car, and finding that out on the morning is a bad way to spend a birthday. Send us their age and licence details when you book. We will not tell them you asked, and it takes one message.

Keeping the surprise intact is straightforward otherwise. We can deliver to an address without saying who arranged it, time the arrival to the minute, and hold off on any messages to the driver until after the handover. Tell us the plan explicitly — including what the driver is and is not supposed to know — and we will work to it. What we will not do is hand a car to somebody who has not signed for it, however good the surprise would be.