My taxi didn't turn up at Bristol Airport. What do I do now?

Call 0117 966 6666. A person answers, day or night, they'll pull up your booking and tell you exactly where the car is. Most of the time this is a genuine mixup, a wrong pickup point, a driver held up by roadworks, a message that didn't land, and it gets fixed with a call rather than a wait. If the car genuinely can't reach you, dispatch sends another rather than leaving you stranded. That's what the 24/7 line is actually for.

Have your booking reference and pickup time ready. It's the fastest way for dispatch to find the driver and tell you exactly what's happening, rather than you guessing at arrivals.

We can't speak for how another company runs its bookings or whether its driver will call back, so the honest advice is to call that operator's own number first, the same way you would with us. If nobody answers and you need to move, Bristol Airport has these fallback options.

Every pre-booked Tick Taxi job to date has had a car turn up — a 100% show-up record across 700+ five-star reviews' worth of journeys. That record isn't luck; it's a protocol. If a driver is delayed by an unexpected traffic situation, we tell you immediately rather than leaving you watching the kerb, dispatch monitors the job live, and if the delay threatens your pickup we assign another driver — something that's only rarely been needed.

So if you're standing at arrivals wondering where your Tick Taxi is: it's almost certainly a pickup-point mixup, and one phone call fixes it. The car is there.

The pattern in this story usually starts before the trip, at booking. Other companies' review pages have "taxi didn't turn up" written through them — so read reviews before you book, not after you've been let down. Two practical rules:

• Check the rating. If a company sits at 4.7 or below, that gap is usually made of no-shows, late cars and unanswered phones — for an airport run, think seriously before booking it.
• Test the response. Companies that maintain five stars and answer messages and emails quickly are the ones you can trust at 4am. Send a question before you book and see how fast a human comes back.

And do the maths honestly: paying £5 more for a company with five stars and reviews that praise the drivers by name beats saving £5 and risking a missed flight or hours stuck at an airport. Check our reviews — 5.0 from 700+ on Google — and check anyone else's the same way.

A car that's "assigned" by an app can still be reassigned by the app to a better-paying job before it reaches you, and there's no human to call when that happens, just the same chat window that made the original booking. A pre-booked airport job with a human dispatcher behind it doesn't get silently swapped out, and if something does go wrong, there's a phone number that's actually answered.

We can't promise every journey with every operator goes smoothly, no one can. What we can tell you is what happens on ours: a real person on the 24/7 line, a booking reference that's actually looked up, and a driver who's assigned to your job specifically, not picked from whoever's nearby when you land.