About Luxury SUV Rides

Jonathan Meersman founded the company in 2017 with a single Chevrolet Suburban and one idea: professional service with a personal touch.

The Suburban is the workhorse of this industry, and choosing an SUV rather than a sedan was deliberate. You can always move someone who booked a sedan up into an SUV. You can never move someone who needs an SUV down into a sedan. We bought the vehicle that works in both directions and have never diversified away from it.

He teaches web development full time at a local college. A teaching year runs about 32 weeks, and the months it leaves open are the months Wisconsin travel is busiest. The company grew into that gap, and it grew through search, because he built and ranked the website himself.

Four months in, a travel booker for a visiting entertainer found that website and asked for seven black SUVs across four days.

Not every trip. There are more reservations in a day than one person can cover, which is what the section below is about. But he still drives, most often the work with the least margin for error, and he still meets new clients himself when the calendar allows.

The reason is not sentiment. Standards decay when the person who set them stops doing the work.

The bottled water in the center console is turned so the label faces you. Snack packaging is set the same way. That is a deliberately small example. It is the kind of thing that survives only if somebody who cares is still checking, and it is easier to show you than to claim.

The first time we advertised for chauffeurs, more than 200 people applied for two positions. Five reached an interview.

The distance between those numbers is the job. A great many applicants counted food delivery as chauffeur experience. It is not.

Everyone who gets past the application goes through the same sequence.

1. A short phone call. Two minutes tells you how someone will sound to a client.
2. A video interview, where what the application claimed gets checked.
3. An in-person interview conducted with the candidate driving, usually a run to the airport. Speed, lane discipline, braking, acceleration, and how they carry themselves at a terminal. One rough habit is coachable. A pattern is not.
4. A motor vehicle report on every candidate, which must come back clean across the window our insurer requires, and an insurance loss report, which catches claims that never produced a police report.

Anyone hired then spends a full day driving the owner from Milwaukee to O’Hare with him in the back seat. Every drop-off door, the limousine staging lot, every pick-up point, the permit, the voucher. The purpose is that the first time that chauffeur goes down alone, none of it is new.

Chauffeurs also complete PAX training, an industry program partnered with the National Limousine Association.

We now hire as much by reputation as by advertisement, and we hire for judgment rather than for a job title. One of our chauffeurs spent his Marine Corps service driving visiting general officers around his base. He had never held the title. He had done the work.

A chauffeur reached the garage at 3:15 AM for a 4:00 AM pick-up and could not get the vehicle out. There was no time to wait.

He drove to the client’s home in his own car, told her exactly what had happened, and got her to the airport in time for her flight. She lived somewhere a rideshare at 4:00 AM was unlikely to appear.

We refunded the ride in full. She told us that was unnecessary. She has been a regular client ever since.

We would rather be judged on that than on a promise, because it answers the question actually worth asking: what happens when the owner is not the one in the car. What happens is that somebody who came through the process above makes the right call without being told.

Multi-vehicle work is routine rather than exceptional. Ten vehicles for a single wedding. Seven for the booking above. A motorcade to Lambeau for a Packers home game.

Numbers like that are possible because we hold standing arrangements with a small group of like-minded local operators, people we have worked alongside for years and vetted the way we vet our own chauffeurs. When a booking outgrows the vehicles we run ourselves, they are who we call, and the standard they are held to is that you should not be able to tell the difference.

We are not a worldwide service. Plenty of operators our size advertise as one. In practice that means subcontracting a city you have never seen to an operator you have never met, and when it goes wrong at 2:00 AM local time it is still your client and still your phone.

We arrange travel elsewhere for existing clients through operators we know personally. We do not sell it as a service area.

Vehicles we own are permitted through the City of Milwaukee. The local contractors we work with hold the same permit. Partner operators in Illinois are licensed under their own state’s livery requirements, a comparable process.

Every vehicle that carries our clients meets or exceeds the commercial insurance required of it.

He does the quoting, the scheduling and the hiring, and takes a share of the driving. At a company this size that is not a boast, it is the job.

He cooks, seriously and often. It is probably the same instinct as the water bottle: most of what makes a meal good happens in the last 10 minutes, and nobody at the table ever sees it.

He lives with his wife Maggie and their four rescue dogs, Eddie, Aldo, Enzo and Looey.

If you have ridden with us, there is a fair chance he was driving at some point. There is a better chance he knows who was.