Blacklane Fail: Driver Forgets Promised Car Seat, I Get Charged $190 Anyway

You’d think that a chauffeur service that promises to “upgrade your travels” and that offers “effortless travel at your fingertips” would do a little better than this. To Blacklane’s credit, I’m impressed by the service recovery, but only after I reached out.

Despite outrageous pricing, Blacklane fails at basics

Ford and I have been in Europe with our older son Miles for a fun trip, and it’s now coming to an end. While we traveled with a car seat, it somehow disappeared during our second to last hotel stay of the trip. We really don’t know what happened — we had a massive amount of luggage (it’s hard to travel light when you’re going to a ski destination and are traveling with a kid), and at some point we realized we just no longer had it, and the hotels we stayed at also claimed they didn’t have it.

Anyway, we had an early morning flight out of Geneva Airport, and were staying in the city for the last night of our trip. At that hour public transportation wasn’t practical, so I knew we needed to figure out some sort of other way to get to the airport.

I decided to book with Blacklane, a known global chauffeur service. Blacklane’s prices have ballooned in recent years — for the short 15-minute drive, the cost was 166 EUR (190 USD). While Switzerland is expensive, that’s next-level. However.

• With the Citi Strata Elite, I receive a $100 Blacklane credit every six months, so that lowered the cost to $90 out of pocket
• A taxi might will run you a minimum of $50 for such a ride, so we’d be paying at most an extra $40 for the piece of mind of knowing we’d have a driver arrive on-time, with a car seat, nice car, etc.

Blacklane’s system for requesting a car seat strikes me as being bizarre. You’d think there would be a specific box you check, a specific confirmation process, or something. Instead, this is what Blacklane says the process is:

Do you provide car seats in pre-booked rides?

Yes, Blacklane provides car seats in pre-booked services only. If you are traveling with small children or an infant and require a child seat or booster, please add your request to the “Notes to the chauffeur” field, including the age and weight of the child. The chauffeur will provide the appropriate car seat at no extra charge.

So I did exactly what I was supposed to do, and filled out that field. This is a global company that I imagine transports thousands of people per day, and I figured that if that’s how they describe their process, then that will work. Want to guess what happened? The driver showed up without a car seat, and seemingly had no clue that the request had been made.

He was very nice and apologetic, and we weren’t mad at him, but of course that wasn’t going to work. Oddly, the trip was marked as “completed” rather than “canceled,” so I was still charged the full amount, despite the failure on Blacklane’s end. I truly think that might have been an honest mistake on his end, but the process just shouldn’t work that way, because it adds even more friction to a bad experience.

Fortunately we managed to get an Uber with a car seat within minutes, and paid a fraction of what we would’ve otherwise paid.

To Blacklane’s credit, the service recovery was good

I try to be balanced in my coverage, so I forwarded my confirmation to Blacklane’s email address, and wrote a few sentences about what happened. I received the following response within an hour, which exceeded my expectations (I’m so used to just getting AI slop customer service responses nowadays):

Thank you for taking the time to reach out and share what happened. We completely understand how essential a baby car seat is when traveling with your little one, and we truly appreciate that you clearly noted this in your special request.

I’m genuinely sorry that we fell short of your expectations and that this situation caused inconvenience during a moment when you should have been able to travel comfortably and confidently. You deserved better from us, and we sincerely regret that this was your experience.

After carefully reviewing the details on our end, you are absolutely right — the ride should have been marked as canceled. Unfortunately, it was mistakenly tagged as finished, which caused our system to register an incorrect charge. Please rest assured that we are escalating this internally so the appropriate corrective actions can be taken.

You will not be charged for this ride. Additionally, as a gesture of our sincere apology, we would like to offer you a 50% promo code. Please let me know if this would be acceptable for you.

For future reference, if you ever need to cancel a ride or encounter any issues, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us directly. We’re always here to help and want to ensure your experience is smooth every time.

So kudos to Blacklane for the service recovery, as that’s one of the fastest and best responses I’ve received from a big, faceless company, in a long time.

Blacklane needs a better system for car seats

Of course humans make mistakes, so I’m not angry at the individual driver for forgetting the car seat, or anything. What really stands out to me about this is how strange and seemingly careless Blacklane’s process is for requesting car seats.

Kids under a certain age need car seats, and that’s a huge percentage of the population. If a chauffeur service claims that the process for requesting a car seat is to simply put it in the notes and that it will be taken care of, then I trust that will be the case. However, it sure seems like simply telling someone to put that in the notes isn’t sufficient, and that there should be a better process.

Also keep in mind that Blacklane doesn’t give you the driver’s contact details until an hour before the ride, so it’s not like you can even message them a day before to remind them and confirm that (not that this should be necessary).

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. While Blacklane labels itself as a high end chauffeur service, and while it’s priced in a way where you expect a very high quality experience, I do hear a lot of complaints about ride experiences. It’s par for the course to see a tech company (which is ultimately what Blacklane is) charge insane rates while contracting out the service, and not living up to what it promises.

For what it’s worth, Ford and his team have arranged a countless number of car services with car seats through hotels for clients over the years, and he can’t remember a single time that the car seat was forgotten. So you’d expect a company that specializes in chauffeur service would be able to reliably get that right as well.

Bottom line

You’d think that a high priced global chauffeur service could at least be reliable with offering car seats for kids when the correct process is followed, but unfortunately exactly the opposite happened. The whole reason we booked Blacklane was because we needed a car seat (since we lost ours during the trip), only to then learn the driver didn’t have the car seat.

Even worse, the ride was marked as completed rather than canceled, so we were even charged. At least Blacklane’s service recovery was good, and within an hour I received a promise of a refund, plus an offer for 50% off a future ride.

So let this serve as a warning — despite Blacklane’s high pricing and promises, don’t count on car seat requests being honored.