What duty of care means here
Duty of care is a company's responsibility for the safety and well-being of its people while they travel on business. For ground transportation it comes down to a simple question: if an executive, an employee, or a visiting client gets into a car your company arranged, can you stand behind who is driving, whether they're insured, and whether anyone can confirm they arrived safely? A ride booked on a personal app answers only part of it: the platform screens its drivers and insures the trip, but your company didn't choose the carrier and may have no record of the ride. A corporate-grade provider can answer all three.
Vetted, professional chauffeurs
The first requirement is who is behind the wheel. Corporate ground transport should use licensed, background-checked professional chauffeurs who drive for a licensed carrier your company can name, not whichever driver an app happens to assign. For sensitive travel, chauffeurs should be NDA-capable. This is the difference between hoping a driver is safe and knowing it.
Commercial insurance and licensed vehicles
Rideshare platforms insure trips under their own policies while a ride is under way, but that is the platform's cover, on the platform's terms. The vehicles moving your people should be commercially licensed and insured by the carrier itself, and the provider should be able to show proof on request. For trips that cross state lines, federal rules require a for-hire passenger carrier to hold FMCSA operating authority and at least $1.5 million of liability coverage for a vehicle seating 15 or fewer, including the driver, or $5 million for 16 or more. Trips within one state follow that state's rules, and state minimums can be far lower, so ask for the carrier's certificate of insurance and limits in writing. If something goes wrong, this is what stands between an incident and a liability the company didn't know it was carrying. Where a booking company arranges the trip through an independent operator, as Ardenmile does across the US, ask whose insurance is in force for the trip and how the operator's licensing and coverage are checked before it carries your travelers.
Visibility and accountability
Duty of care isn't only prevention, it's knowing. Real-time trip visibility, the chauffeur's identity and contact, the vehicle, and live status, lets an assistant or a security contact confirm a pickup happened and a traveler arrived, without a phone call. For inbound VIPs and late-night travel, that visibility is the whole point.
Building it into policy
The cleanest way to meet the standard is to write it into your ground-transportation policy: company travel moves only with an approved, insured provider whose chauffeurs are vetted, with trip visibility on every ride. That single clause turns duty of care from an assumption into a rule, and it's straightforward to set up with one corporate account.
