Force Majeure Policy

What force majeure means

Every booking assumes the road is open, the weather is ordinary and the district is calm. Most days it is. Occasionally it is not: a highway is washed out, a curfew is announced overnight, a strike stops traffic across an entire state for two days. None of that is caused by us and none of it is caused by you, and working out afterwards whose fault it was, when it was actually nobody’s, helps neither of us. This policy exists so that both sides know, before anything like that happens, exactly what qualifies, what does not, and what happens to your booking and your payment either way.

A force majeure event is one that prevents us performing your trip and that is genuinely outside our reasonable control, and could not have been avoided by reasonable steps on our part.

The sections that follow set out three things in order: which events actually qualify, how that is told apart from an ordinary failure on our part, and exactly what happens to your trip and your money once an event is confirmed.

Events covered

The list below is deliberately specific rather than general, because a vague standard invites argument later and a specific one does not. Each of these is a category of event that can be checked against something outside our own say-so: a government notification, a police record, a news report, a weather bulletin.

• Act of God: earthquake, flood, landslide, cloudburst, heavy snow, road closure, bridge collapse.
• War, terrorism, riot, civil unrest, bandh, hartal, curfew, or an order under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita.
• A strike or lockout, including a transport strike.
• An epidemic, pandemic or public-health order.
• A government or regulatory order, permit suspension, or an airspace or border closure.
• VIP or VVIP movement and a resulting security lockdown.
• A supplier’s insolvency where that supplier is outside our group.
• Failure of an essential utility affecting our ability to operate.

We treat every one of these as a genuine, verifiable event, not as a convenient label reached for after something has gone wrong. Where a force majeure event is claimed, we look for the same kind of evidence you would expect to see yourself: a dated government order, a published news report, a police or district administration notice, or a supplier’s own written communication. Heavy traffic, a delayed flight with no connected event behind it, or a general reference to “bad weather” does not, on its own, meet that standard. The event has to be a specific, dated, checkable thing that genuinely affected your route on the day of your trip.

What is not force majeure

Force majeure is a real legal protection, and in the wrong hands it is also a convenient excuse. A driver who oversleeps, a vehicle that was not serviced on time, a booking we simply failed to staff: none of that is an event outside anyone’s control, it is an operational failure, and describing it as force majeure would let us avoid the stricter standard this site holds us to when a cancellation is actually our fault. That is the reason this distinction exists, and the reason the list of what does not qualify is short and specific rather than a general escape clause.

Our own inefficiency, our own vehicle being unavailable where no listed event caused it, and your own change of mind are not force majeure. Where we cancel a trip for a reason within our control, our Cancellation & Refund Policy applies, not this page.

The same applies from your side. A change of plan, a missed connection unconnected to any event listed above, or simply deciding you no longer need the car are ordinary cancellations, and they are handled under our Cancellation & Refund Policy on its own terms, not treated as force majeure because something inconvenient happened to coincide with them.

Notification

We will tell you as soon as we know a force majeure event affects your trip, and you should tell us as soon as you become aware of one that might.

In practice that means a call or a message on the number you booked with, sent the moment we have enough information to say your specific trip is actually affected, rather than that something has happened somewhere in the same state. We would rather confirm the position and tell you once, clearly, than alarm you over an event that turns out not to touch your route or your dates. If you hear of a landslide, a curfew, a strike or any other qualifying event ahead of a trip you have booked with us, the quickest way to reach us is through the details on our /contact page. Telling us early gives us the most time to work out an alternative before your pick-up time arrives, which is almost always a better outcome than waiting for us to reach you.

What happens to your trip

When a qualifying event does affect a confirmed trip, our first move is never a refund. It is to work out whether the trip can still happen, by a different route on the same day, or on a later date once conditions clear. A refund comes into the picture only once neither of those is realistic, and even then it is not a blanket write-off of the booking. It is the amount we are actually able to recover, after accounting for costs that were already committed on your behalf and that cannot themselves be recovered from anyone. The clause below sets out exactly how that works.

Where a force majeure event prevents performance, we will first offer an alternative arrangement or a rescheduled date. Where that is not possible or not accepted, we will refund all amounts we are able to recover, less third-party costs actually incurred and evidenced by us. We will show you the evidence of any deduction, itemised.

“Amounts we are able to recover” matters because a booking is rarely only our own time. It can involve a toll pass already loaded, a permit fee already paid, or a hotel room already confirmed for a multi-day itinerary, and third-party costs like these are not always returned to us once they have been committed. Where a cost genuinely cannot be recovered, we deduct only that specific amount, evidenced, and never a flat cancellation charge dressed up as a force majeure deduction. “Itemised” is not a formality here: it means an actual receipt or invoice against each amount withheld, not an estimate or a round figure, and you are entitled to see it before you accept the refund.

The distinction that matters most

This is the clause that protects you when the reason a trip does not happen is genuinely ours rather than an event outside anyone’s control. A vehicle that was not made ready, a driver who did not turn up, a permit we let lapse, or simply taking on more bookings than we could honour are not events beyond our control, however inconvenient they are for us to admit to, and this policy does not let us treat them as if they were. Where the fault is ours, you are not asked to accept less. You are put right.

Where we cancel a confirmed service for reasons within our control, vehicle unavailability, driver unavailability, permit failure or overbooking, that is not force majeure. We will arrange a replacement of equal or higher class at our cost, and failing that refund you in full with no deduction whatsoever.

In practice, that means we look first for another vehicle, of the class you booked or better, at no extra cost to you, before a refund is even discussed. A full refund only comes into play where no replacement can genuinely be arranged in the time available, and where that happens nothing is held back: no cancellation charge, no processing fee, no deduction of any kind for costs on our side of the booking. The gap between this clause and the one above is deliberate. One describes an event nobody could have prevented; the other describes a commitment we did not keep, and the two are not allowed to end in the same outcome.

Costs incurred en route

Where a force majeure event strands a multi-day trip, an extra hotel night or an extra vehicle day genuinely caused by that event is discussed with you at the time and settled on a receipted, at-actuals basis. Neither of us bears the other’s ordinary travel costs by default.

Take a multi-day hill trip where a landslide closes the only road back for a day. Neither of us caused that, and neither of us could reasonably have foreseen it that morning. What follows from it is straightforward. You now need a hotel room for the extra night, and our vehicle and driver are on the ground for an extra day, and both of those are real costs created directly by the event rather than by either of us choosing them. We do not treat a situation like that as an opportunity to charge a premium rate, and we do not expect you to simply absorb the whole cost either. We discuss the position with you as soon as the closure is confirmed, agree the arrangement before the extra night is actually booked wherever that is practically possible, and settle the bill afterwards against the real hotel receipt and the extra day’s vehicle charge at the rate already agreed for your trip, not a special rate invented for the situation.

“Ordinary travel costs” in this context means the kind of expense any trip carries regardless of the event: meals, personal purchases, anything unconnected to the closure itself. Those stay exactly where they would have been on any ordinary day of the trip. A landslide changes where the vehicle and the driver spend an unplanned night. It does not change who pays for your dinner.

Suspension, not termination, where temporary

Where a force majeure event is temporary, we treat your booking as suspended rather than cancelled and work with you on a revised date, unless you would prefer the refund set out above.

In practice that means your booking does not lapse the moment an event occurs. We hold it, wait for conditions to clear or for the event to be confirmed as over, and then contact you to agree a revised date and, where it matters, a revised pick-up time, at the rate you originally booked rather than a fresh one. If the revised date does not suit you, for any reason, you are not held to it. The refund described earlier in this policy remains available to you on the same terms, whenever you decide a rescheduled trip is no longer what you want.