0141 473 4300

Our commitments – and our limits

Most transfer companies tell you they’re the best. We’d rather tell you exactly what we guarantee, where we rely on other people, and what happens when something goes wrong — so you can decide for yourself whether we’re right for your journey.

This page is deliberately specific. Everything on it is a commitment we’re accountable for.

What we guarantee in Scotland

Every journey within Scotland is driven by drivers who work with us regularly and who we know.

A price that doesn’t move
Agreed before you travel. Not affected by traffic, time of day, demand or how long the journey actually takes. No meters, no surge, no booking fee, no card surcharge.
Your flight, monitored
On every airport arrival, at no cost. If you land early or late, your pick-up moves to match. You don’t need to contact us.
60 minutes’ free waiting
From the moment your flight lands — enough for immigration, baggage reclaim and customs. After 60 minutes, 50p per minute, paid to your driver.
A licensed, checked driver
Licensed private hire drivers, Disclosure Scotland checked, in licensed, insured and inspected vehicles.
Driver details before you travel
Name, contact number and vehicle, sent by text and email ahead of your pick-up. You know who’s coming before they arrive.
A human on the phone, 24 hours
0141 473 4300, any hour, any day of the year. Not a chatbot, and not an app with no support line.

Our record, and how we measure it

Since 2017 we’ve completed over 18,000 journeys with a 99.3% on-time pick-up rate — roughly 7 late pick-ups in every 1,000 journeys.

  • On time means the driver was at the agreed pick-up point at or before the booked time. For airport arrivals, in the terminal before the passenger cleared baggage reclaim.
  • Counted across every completed booking, not a sample. Customer cancellations excluded. Late arrivals caused by us count as failures — including traffic and vehicle problems.
  • Source: our own dispatch records, 2017 to date. Internal figures, not independently audited.

Independently verifiable: 4.9 on Google from 1,185 reviews, 4.8 on Trustpilot, 4.9 on Tripadvisor.

How we actually hit 99.3%

A number on a page is easy to write. Here is the machinery behind it, because being on time for a 5am pick-up is a logistics problem, not a promise.

1
Your driver is allocated the day before, not dispatched on the night. This is the single biggest difference between us and an app. A ride-hailing service finds you a driver at the moment you need one, which works well at 6pm on a Friday and fails at 4am on a Tuesday when there is nobody around to accept the job. Ours is already assigned, already knows about your booking, and has already planned the morning around it.
2
Live flight data sits in every driver’s app, from FlightRadar24. Not a screenshot of a departure board taken that morning. Your driver sees your actual inbound flight, in real time, and watches it move. If you take off forty minutes late, they know before you have landed and long before you reach the terminal.
3
Our system checks the day’s schedule against those live delays and flags conflicts early. If a delayed flight means a driver’s next two bookings would overlap, that is spotted while there is still time to do something about it. The driver hands one job back to the office, we reallocate it to another driver, and both passengers are collected on time. Neither of them ever knows there was a problem.
4
A person in the office, 24 hours a day. Software spots the clash. Someone who knows the drivers, the roads and the day decides what to do about it. That combination is why the 4am pick-up, the one that most often goes wrong elsewhere, is the booking we handle best.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Most late pick-ups are not caused by a driver oversleeping. They are caused by a delay earlier in the day that nobody noticed until it was too late to fix. Catching that at 9am instead of 3pm is the whole game, and it is the difference between 99.3% and the industry’s usual shrug.

If your flight is delayed

You don’t need to do anything. We monitor every inbound flight and adjust your pick-up automatically — no phone call, no message, no rebooking, and no extra charge. Here’s exactly how it works, including where the limits are.

What we do

1
We track your flight from the moment you book. We use live flight data tied to your flight number, so we see delays as they happen — often before you do.
2
Your pick-up time moves to match. Your driver is re-timed against your actual landing time, not the one on your original booking. The fare doesn’t change.
3
You get 60 minutes’ free waiting from touchdown. Enough for immigration, baggage reclaim and customs, even on a busy arrivals bank.
4
If you’re held up beyond that, waiting is charged at 50p per minute, paid directly to your driver. That’s the only circumstance in which a delay costs you anything.

Where the limits are

Most operators stop at “we track your flight”. These are the situations that actually worry people, so here’s our position on each.

A long delay — several hours
We re-time your pick-up and, where the delay is long enough that we can’t hold the same driver, we reallocate the job. Your fare is unchanged either way.
Your flight is diverted to another airport
Call us on 0141 473 4300 as soon as you know — we’re staffed 24 hours. We’ll do our best to pick you up from the diversion airport instead.
Your flight is cancelled or you’re moved to the next day
Tell us and we’ll move your booking to the new flight at no charge. If your plans change entirely, our standard cancellation terms apply: more than 24 hours’ notice, full refund; less than 24 hours, we hold the full value as credit valid for 365 days.
What we can’t control
We can’t recover a missed onward connection, and we can’t compensate for costs arising from your airline’s delay — that’s a matter for the airline or your travel insurance. What we can do is make sure the transfer part of the journey isn’t one more thing to worry about.

In short: a delayed flight should cost you nothing with us, and in the overwhelming majority of cases it doesn’t. Where it might, we’d rather you knew the number in advance than found it on an invoice.

Where we use partners, and how we choose them

Within Scotland, your journey is driven by our own drivers.

Outside Scotland, and occasionally at times of exceptional demand, we arrange journeys through partner private hire operators. Every partner must hold current operator and driver licensing and appropriate insurance for the journey concerned. Where a journey will be partner-fulfilled, we tell you before you travel.

We’re being straightforward about this because it’s the honest position. Our service in Glasgow, Edinburgh and across Scotland is something we control directly and stand behind completely. A transfer in Manchester or London is arranged by us and delivered by someone we’ve vetted — a good service, but a different thing, and you deserve to know which one you’re getting.

What happens when something goes wrong

Your driver hasn’t arrived
Call 0141 473 4300 immediately. We’ll locate your driver or arrange an alternative vehicle. If we can’t get you moving, we refund your fare in full.
You can’t find your driver at the airport
Call us and we’ll connect you directly. Your driver will normally be in the arrivals hall with a name board.
Your flight is cancelled or you miss it
Tell us as soon as you know and we’ll move your booking to your new flight at no charge.
You need to cancel
More than 24 hours’ notice: full refund, no fee. Less than 24 hours: we hold the full value as credit against any future journey, valid for 365 days. You don’t lose the money.
Something went wrong and you want to complain
Email office@glatransfers.co.uk. We aim to respond within one working day, and we’d rather hear it from you than read it in a review.

What we don’t claim

  • We’re not the cheapest, and we don’t try to be. If price is your only consideration, a ride-hailing app at a quiet hour will usually beat us.
  • We can’t prove we’re more reliable than every quality operator in the UK. Nobody can – there’s no neutral published benchmark for this industry. We can show you our own figures and tell you how we counted them.
  • We’re pre-booked only. We can’t be hailed in the street or picked up from the rank, and we ask for at least two hours’ notice.
  • We’re an airport transfer specialist first. We do city-to-city, corporate and event work well, but short local hops aren’t where we’re strongest.

Reliability, delays and waiting time

Do you guarantee the quoted price even if my flight is severely delayed?

Yes. The fare quoted when you book with GLA Transfers is the fare you pay, however late your flight lands. A four hour delay does not change it. GLA Transfers tracks your inbound flight with live FlightRadar24 data and moves your pick-up automatically, so a delay is a scheduling matter at our end rather than a billing matter at yours. You do not need to call us, rebook, or pay anything extra.

Do you charge for waiting time if my flight is late?

No. A delayed flight costs you nothing with GLA Transfers. Your pick-up is re-timed against your actual landing time rather than the time on your original booking, and your 60 minutes of free waiting begins from the moment you touch down rather than from when you were originally due. However long the aircraft is held up, the clock has not started, so the delay itself is never charged for.

Are airport fees, tolls and parking included in the price?

Yes. The fixed fare quoted by GLA Transfers is the total you pay. Airport pick-up and drop-off charges, tolls and parking are all inside it, there is no booking fee and no card surcharge, and nothing is collected by your driver at the end of the journey. Once you have paid the fare there is nothing further to think about. The single exception is waiting time beyond your 60 free minutes after landing, which is the only thing that can ever be added and is entirely within your control.

What happens if my flight is diverted to another airport?

Call GLA Transfers on 0141 473 4300 as soon as you know, at any hour. A diversion is one of the few situations live flight tracking cannot solve on its own, because your booking is now for the wrong airport rather than the wrong time. We will do our best to collect you from the diversion airport instead, and we will tell you plainly what we can arrange rather than leaving you to work it out at an unfamiliar arrivals gate.

Do you actually turn up on time for 4am and 5am pick-ups?

Yes, and it is the booking GLA Transfers is built around. Your driver is allocated the day before rather than dispatched on the night, so the job is already planned into their morning rather than offered to whoever happens to be awake and nearby. That is the single biggest difference between a pre-booked private hire operator and a ride hailing app, because 4am on a Tuesday is precisely when there is nobody around to accept a job. GLA Transfers holds a 99.3% on-time rate across more than 18,000 journeys since 2017.

How reliable are you during peak travel periods and school holidays?

Capacity at peak is a planning problem rather than a luck problem. Because GLA Transfers works from pre-booked journeys rather than on-demand requests, the day’s work is known in advance and drivers are allocated against it, which is why availability does not collapse on the busiest Friday of a school holiday the way an on-demand app’s does. Book early for the busiest weeks and your fare and your driver are both locked in.

Do you operate over Christmas and New Year?

GLA Transfers runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, including Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. A festive tariff applies to journeys between 00:00 on 24 December and 23:59 on 26 December, and between 00:00 on 31 December and 23:59 on 2 January. It is already built into the price shown when you book, so you see the exact fare before you pay and it does not change afterwards. We publish those dates in advance rather than surging on the night.

What happens in snow, ice or severe weather?

GLA Transfers drivers know the routes and the conditions, and in bad weather we build in more time rather than driving faster. If you are travelling to a flight in poor conditions, book a little earlier than you otherwise would and tell us the flight you are catching so we can plan the run properly. Where conditions make a journey genuinely unsafe we will say so, which is the one circumstance in which we would rather lose the fare than complete it.

Can I move or rebook a journey if my plans change?

Yes, free of charge, provided you have more than two hours before your pick-up time. Change the flight, the time, the address or the number of passengers in the app, by email or by phone, as many times as you need. Inside two hours, call GLA Transfers on 0141 473 4300 and we will do what we can. If you need to cancel rather than move it, more than 24 hours’ notice is a full refund with no fee, and inside 24 hours we hold the full value as credit against any future journey for 365 days.

I have a tight connection between landing and a meeting. How do you handle that?

Tell GLA Transfers the time you need to be there when you book, not just the time you land. Your driver is allocated in advance and knows the route, your inbound flight is tracked live so the pick-up moves with it, and your driver meets you inside the terminal with a name board rather than waiting in a car park while you look for them. If a delay becomes serious enough to put the connection at risk, someone in our office is looking at it before you have your bag.

I have been let down by a ride hailing app before. Why would this be different?

Because the two things solve different problems. A ride hailing app finds you a driver at the moment you ask, which works well at 6pm on a Friday and fails at 4am on a Tuesday when nobody accepts the job. GLA Transfers assigns your driver the day before, fixes your price when you book rather than estimating it, tracks your flight, and answers the phone with a person 24 hours a day. There is no cancellation at the last minute because there is no auction happening at the last minute.

How do I know your on-time record is real?

You do not have to take our word for it alone. GLA Transfers measures on-time performance across every completed booking rather than a sample, publishes the figure and the definition behind it, and states plainly on this page that it is an internal number and not independently audited. Alongside that there are 1,185 reviews on Google at 4.9, plus 4.8 on Trustpilot and 4.9 on Tripadvisor, written by people who were not asked to be kind. GLA Transfers Ltd is registered in Scotland, company number SC684992.

Book with confidence

Plans change. Flights move, meetings shift, trips get cancelled. None of that should cost you the fare you’ve already paid — so it doesn’t.

Cancel late and you still don’t lose the money
More than 24 hours’ notice and you get a full refund with no admin fee. Inside 24 hours we hold the full value as credit, valid for 365 days against any future journey. Most operators simply keep it.
Change your booking free
New flight, different time, extra passenger, different address. Amend it in the app, by email or by phone. There is no amendment charge, and no limit on how many times, provided you have more than two hours before your pick-up.
Flight moves? We move with it
We track your inbound flight and re-time your pick-up automatically. You don’t need to tell us, rebook, or pay anything extra — and you have 60 minutes’ free waiting from touchdown.
Lock your return at today’s price
Book both legs together and your return fare is fixed now, whatever the date, time or demand when you fly back. It’s the same price at 4am on a bank holiday. Festive tariff dates over Christmas and New Year are the one exception, and they’re shown in your quote before you pay.

Who we are

GLA Transfers — trading since 2017, incorporated as GLA Transfers Ltd in January 2021.
Registered in Scotland, company number SC684992.
Registered office: 300 Bath Street, Glasgow, G2 4JR.
Licensed private hire operator.
“GLA Transfers” is a registered UK trade mark – Trade mark number UK00004375377

This page sets out our service commitments. Our full contractual terms are in our terms and conditions. Where the two differ, the terms and conditions apply — but if anything here isn’t matching your experience, we want to know.