Planning a Black Cab Tour of London

There is nothing to turn up to. You book a licensed London taxi and its driver for a block of hours, they come to the address you give them, and the whole thing happens between those two points. What you are really deciding is three things: how many hours, which theme if any, and where you want to be standing at the end.

What you are hiring, and for how long

The unit is the cab, not the seat. Everything below follows from that, and it is why a fare that looks steep beside a bus ticket often is not. Four blocks are sold here, and they answer different questions.

Nine hours exists too, and it is a different product: it leaves London for the Cotswolds and comes back after dark. That one is on black cab day trips out of London.

What the fare covers, and what it does not

Read this before you compare two prices, because the gap between two similar fares is usually sitting in this table rather than in the hours.

Choosing your hours: two, three, four or six

Length is the first decision and theme is the second. If you already know you want the Beatles addresses or the Christmas lights, those routes have fixed lengths of their own — the Beatles routes run three to five hours and the lights runs two and a half to three.

Two hours

Enough for a loop of Westminster, the City and the Tower with the cab pulling in at six of them. You will not go inside anything and you will pass three landmarks without stopping. Take it on your first morning and you will spend the rest of the week knowing where things are.

Three hours

The length most people should book. It adds time out of the cab at the stops that hold you, and it is the length every themed route is built to. Fourteen stops is what one three-hour listing publishes, which tells you how much ground a cab covers when it is not looking for a parking space.

Four to six hours

Long enough to add the parts of London nobody photographs, or to give a theme its own day. Six hours usually includes a lunch stop, and at that length the driver's own suggestions start to matter more than your list.

Where the cab collects you

All but one of these tours collect you at an address you choose in central London, and several publish the exact postcodes they cover. That list is worth checking against your hotel before you book — the full set, and what happens at the edges of it, is on the pickup and route page.

Three things that decide it for most travellers: one tour will collect at Heathrow or London City and drop you back there, two say plainly that they never serve airports, and one has no pickup at all and meets you at Sloane Square Underground station instead. If your day starts at a terminal, only one of those three is any use to you.

Booking: how far ahead, and what happens next

A week is comfortable for most of the year. December is not most of the year: the lights tours run for about seven weeks and the good evening slots go early, so book those in October if your dates are fixed. One operator confirms within 48 hours rather than instantly, which matters if you are booking for tomorrow.

After you book, the operator contacts you to settle the pickup address and the start time. Several of the reviews describe a driver confirming the plan days ahead, which is the point at which to say what you want to see, what you want to skip, and whether anyone in the party has trouble walking.

On the day: weather, traffic and the clock

Rain is the least of it. You are in a heated vehicle for most of the tour and the photo stops are optional, which is the single biggest advantage this format has over a walking tour or an open-top bus. Bring a coat for the stops you do want to make.

What travellers actually say about that, in their own words, is on the reviews page.

Traffic is the real constraint, and it is the one complaint that recurs across the reviews: the clock starts at the booked time and London does not always cooperate. A driver who knows the back routes is what you are paying for, and the same reviews say so. If you are set on the Changing of the Guard, take an early start — the King's Guard changes at 11am on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and the roads around it close before that. Check the schedule on the day; it moves.

The one thing that really changes with the season is the light. In mid-December London is dark by about four in the afternoon, and in mid-June it is light until after nine. What that does to an afternoon booking is set out month by month on the weather and best-time page.

Frequently asked questions

The rest of them are on the FAQ page, and the pricing arithmetic gets a page of its own in what a black cab tour costs.

When you are ready to compare them, every one of the London black cab sightseeing tours listed here shows its hours, its cap and what its fare covers. The full list is on Black Cab London Tours.