We've had a number of callers at what you may term unsociable hours, where the caller has indicated that they have tried a few other
couriers without an answer. We of course will always answer the phone, on this occasion it was 9 pm and the caller needed his passport at a consular service agent in London for 7am in the morning. After agreeing to our quote (which incidentally did not carry any sort of out of hours surcharge) arrangements were made for the courier to collect that evening and set off early in the morning directly from his home, this suits us as it doesn't matter how quiet you try to be, an unusual motorbike driving down a residential street at 5 am in the morning will always disturb someone, I know this personally as our dog barks if a motorbike with a different tone to mine passes the house.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4BI5ValGZIeoCrcBKCQX3-j-fNmSkJXXKz2XFObZaTVUgMrzqN-0Bm7pVAyIMHNfCVp729SUDe50SLiuvWu26irdZcZQ0Ji3-a19AukhlMiVDoRyRF-kU_H5fYetfNNIL_3hZeKjHMklp/s1600/london+dawn.jpg)
The passport was delivered as soon as the agent was open and the biker was on his way out before the capital had woken up.
On the subject of out of hours surcharges, we do not add charges for this reason. In many respects it's far easier for a
courier to go about his business out side the normal working hours, there's less traffic in the middle of the night. I was shocked a couple of months ago to learn when giving out such a quote that a major London based courier had loaded the quote by around 50% for the out of hours requirements, knowing how these sort of companies work they were highly unlikely to be offering the courier an increased tariff due to the unusual collection times. This is of course subject to ensuring that the courier has been rested enough during the day to enable a late/early job.