When the train cancels, the airport closes, the suitcases won't fit through the ticket barrier, or you simply don't fancy two changes and a replacement bus — we'll drive you. Manchester for £422.45, Brighton for £117.95, Oxford for £128.45, all on the meter you'd see on a four-mile Kingston run. Same vehicle, same driver, no surge, no surprises at the other end.
Same £3.50 base, same £2.10 per mile as a school run in Kingston. No long-distance loading, no return-mileage padding, no driver subsistence fee.
ASLEF, RMT, signal failure, overhead wires down at Watford — none of it touches our schedule. The long-distance desk opens early bookings 72 hours before any announced strike and prioritises the worst-hit corridors first.
From your kerb to their kerb, with your luggage in the same boot the whole way. No tube to Euston, no platform sprint, no shuttle bus on arrival, no fighting a wheelie case down an escalator at Piccadilly.
There is no separate long-distance tariff. The meter you see on every EasyCab fare quote — base fare plus per-mile after the first half mile — is the same meter that runs to Manchester. Wait time is zero on motorway running because you're moving the whole time. The result: a London → Manchester job that comes out at £422.45 on the saloon meter, not a sales-driven "from-£249" tease.
Multi-vehicle tiers follow the same multipliers as every other ride. An Estate is +25%, an MPV is +50%, an 8-Seater is +100%. The same numbers a six-mile Surbiton job uses.
Fares below assume a saloon, no waiting, motorway running. Multi-vehicle quotes (Estate, MPV, 8-Seater) follow the standard tier multipliers. Drive time is dispatch's planning estimate and bakes in one ten-minute stretch break at the halfway services.
All fares above are computed live from config/pricing.php via $helpers->meter_fare(miles, 0, 'saloon'). Change the £/mile in one file and every row updates next time the page loads. For an Estate add 25%, MPV add 50%, 8-Seater add 100%. Cities outside this list — Penzance, Inverness, Aberystwyth, Holyhead, Penzance — are quote-on-request because they\'re a two-driver job. Ring dispatch and you'll have a number inside 30 minutes.
ASLEF, RMT, signal failure, overhead wires down at Watford — none of it touches our schedule. Dispatch opens early bookings 72 hours before any announced strike and prioritises the worst-hit corridors first. Two drivers are held on standby every strike day for short-notice bookings, and the same family-run team you'd ring at three on a Tuesday afternoon is on the long-distance phones at six on strike-day Friday.
Each card shows the all-in saloon-meter price for a London → Manchester run on that tier. Add 25 % to scale up to an Estate, 50 % to MPV or Executive, 100 % to an 8-Seater. The Wheelchair Accessible vehicle is the same price as a saloon — accessibility never carries a surcharge at EasyCab.
RMT walkout meant no LNER service from King's Cross. Two cousins from Whitechapel, one Estate, four bags, Leeds for a rehearsal dinner. Quoted Wednesday, confirmed Thursday, kerb to kerb Friday morning.
BA cancelled the Heathrow → Manchester connector twice in a row. Family of four, four cases, three hours' notice. MPV up to MAN T3, kept the seat, made the Dubai flight. Receipt to business@easycab.org next morning.
Post-surgery, can't sit through three trains. WAV vehicle with side-loading ramp, two-hour run down the M11. Same fare as a saloon — accessibility never carries a surcharge.
Client wouldn't fly post-COVID, train was on strike, executive saloon up the A1 with a driver swap at Newcastle. Bottle of water on the back seat, working table, three Zoom calls between Doncaster and Berwick. Quote-on-request — they got it.
Three bags, a printer, a guitar, a microwave. Train would have meant two changes and a 40-minute taxi at the other end. We did it for less than a single-leg train ticket plus a London-end Uber.
Family of six, four suitcases, three rucksacks, one infant carrier, a folded pushchair and the dog. 8-Seater straight down the M20 from Surbiton, dropped at the foot-passenger terminal twenty minutes before boarding.
Friday 7 August. Avanti West Coast cancelled, LNER reduced, replacement coach from Watford. Two cousins, a wedding suit in a garment carrier, one weekend bag each, dropped at a Whitworth Street registry office before lunch.
"It cost less than two Avanti advance tickets and we didn't have to lift the garment carrier once. Worth every penny of the meter." — Ella, KT1
I run a small architecture practice in Putney. When the trains went out in November the team needed to be in Birmingham for a planning hearing the next morning. Six people, four boxes of drawings, an MPV at six in the morning. The number EasyCab quoted on the Wednesday was the number on the invoice. The number doesn't move. That's the whole sales pitch and that's why we use them.
Quotes outside the routes table — Edinburgh, Inverness, Penzance, Holyhead, ferry ports — come back inside 30 minutes. We hold the quote for 24 hours so you can think about it without losing the price.
It's the same meter every EasyCab journey uses — £3.50 base, £2.10 per mile after the first half mile, no surge, no airport surcharge, no premium for distance. A London → Manchester run on the saloon meter works out at £422.45 all-in. Multi-vehicle tiers (Estate, MPV, Executive, 8-Seater) apply the standard multipliers — the same ones you'd see on a 4-mile Kingston run.
Yes. If you book pickup and drop-off plus the return leg in the same booking, dispatch knocks £5.00 off the return-leg fare. There's no separate "return rate" or empty-mileage padding — you pay one meter outbound and one meter back, less the return discount. If you only need a one-way drop (you're flying back, or someone's picking you up), the meter only runs once. We don't charge for the driver's journey home.
Nothing on your bill. The meter on long-distance runs is a flat per-mile from A to B — no waiting clock for cleared motorway slowdowns. The only time waiting time kicks in is if you ask the driver to stop (a Welcome Break, a stretch break, a hospital visit en route) and the engine sits idle. Routine motorway crawls are absorbed by us, not you.
If you're booking the return leg inside the same booking and your dates align, dispatch will try to put the same driver on both legs — particularly for overnight stays and weddings. If your dates are further apart (a three-day Manchester trip, say), we'll usually rotate so the same driver isn't away from their family for that long, but we'll always honour the same vehicle tier.
The Estate. Four adults fit comfortably in an Estate cabin and the boot swallows four mid-size suitcases without anything riding on a lap. The maths: £528.06 all-in to Manchester (vs £422.45 for the saloon, which would have one bag on the back seat). For five-plus people or six-plus bags you're into MPV territory — £633.68 for the same run.
They're the time we're busiest. Drivers know the strike calendar as well as the union does — we open the long-distance dispatch queue 72 hours before any announced ASLEF or RMT day and prioritise the routes hit hardest (West Coast Mainline, Great Western, East Coast). Book as early as you can; on the day of, we'll still try, but the closer to departure, the more likely we're out of vehicles on that corridor.
Wales yes — Cardiff, Swansea, Aberystwyth, Bangor are routine. Scotland we do but it's a 7-hour-plus run, so it's a two-driver booking (we swap at a halfway point so neither driver is past their working-time directive) and it's a quote-on-request job, not a meter run. Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen — ring dispatch and we'll come back inside 30 minutes with a quote.
Dover, Folkestone, Newhaven, Harwich and Portsmouth are all in our long-distance book. Eurotunnel terminal at Folkestone too — we can drop you at the terminal or, on quote, take the car through and bring you door-to-door on the continental side (rare, but it's happened twice this year for medical transfers).
Yes — book it as hourly hire on the return leg. Common pattern: cab up to Birmingham for a meeting, four-hour hourly hire while you're in the building, cab back. That way you avoid the empty-cab problem and the driver gets a hot meal at a Premier Inn. Pricing follows our standard hourly rates plus the long-distance return mileage.
For midweek runs, 48 hours is comfortable. For Friday-evening long-distance (every wedding, every reunion, every football fixture), book a week ahead — the long-distance dispatch desk closes new Friday bookings at 9pm the previous Wednesday. For train-strike days, we open early bookings 72 hours before the strike date and they sell out by lunchtime the day before.
Type your pickup postcode, type the destination postcode, see the meter. No surge, no strike risk, no luggage limits — the number you see at booking is the number on the receipt three hundred miles later.