The Standard Expected
by Foreign Missions

Washington DC hosts more than 175 foreign embassies and missions. When delegations, foreign ministers, ambassadors and their staff require ground transportation, the expectations are precise: confidentiality, protocol awareness, punctuality, and zero margin for error.

HSB Sedan Service has provided ground transportation for embassy staff, foreign delegations and diplomatic visiting parties across the DC metro area. We understand the sensitivity and formality these engagements require, and we operate accordingly.

What Every Delegation
Engagement Includes

Delegation Transport
Requires Coordination,
Not a Widget

Unlike an individual booking, delegation ground transportation involves multiple vehicles, specific protocol requirements, often sensitive personnel, and coordination across airports, embassies, and government buildings.

We review every delegation inquiry personally. A dedicated coordinator responds within 2 business hours to confirm logistics, vehicle allocation, pricing, and any special requirements.

What Happens
Before a Delegation Moves

A single-passenger booking is a dispatch task. A delegation movement is a planning task, and most of the work happens before anyone gets into a vehicle. The sequence below is what we need to agree with your mission or protocol office, and the detail you can give us at each stage is what determines whether the movement runs cleanly.

Hourly As-Directed,
Not Point-to-Point

Delegation movements are booked hourly as-directed rather than as a series of transfers, and the reason is practical rather than commercial. A delegation visit is a day or several days of engagements whose timings are set by other people — a bilateral that overruns, a courtesy call added that morning, a security detail that changes the departure. Booked as separate point-to-point transfers, every one of those changes means releasing a vehicle and recalling it, and a party standing outside a building waiting for a car that is twenty minutes away.

As-directed keeps the vehicles and the chauffeurs with the party for the whole block. The convoy stays assembled, so the order and seating agreed with your protocol officer hold throughout the day rather than being reconstructed at each pickup. The same chauffeurs can stay with a delegation across a multi-day visit. And because the cars wait rather than leave, a schedule that slips by forty minutes costs you forty minutes rather than a new booking.

Hourly as-directed carries a three-hour minimum and is billed in fifteen-minute increments beyond the booked block; multi-vehicle movements are quoted per engagement. Current rates for individual journeys are on the rates page. Tell us the shape of the day on the inquiry form and a coordinator will set out the vehicle allocation and the hours in writing.

The Geography of
Diplomatic Washington

Most of the chanceries in Washington sit along or just off Massachusetts Avenue NW, running northwest from Dupont Circle past Sheridan Circle toward the Naval Observatory — the stretch known as Embassy Row. Others are clustered in Kalorama immediately north of it, around Dupont Circle, and in the West End. Ambassadorial residences are frequently in Kalorama and Woodley Park rather than at the chancery itself, which means a single day can involve a residence pickup, a chancery stop and a downtown appointment that are nowhere near each other.

The practical consequences matter more than the map. Massachusetts Avenue is a sequence of traffic circles rather than a straight run, many chanceries front directly onto it with limited frontage and no forecourt, and the side streets in Kalorama are narrow and heavily parked. Where a vehicle can actually stand varies address by address. For Hill appointments the Capitol complex adds its own constraints — see our Capitol Hill car service page. The State Department sits apart from all of this in Foggy Bottom.

We also serve the related institutional traffic: the World Bank and IMF, the Organization of American States, the embassy-adjacent law and government-affairs firms downtown, and the hotels that host visiting delegations. For the Embassy Row corridor specifically see limo service on Embassy Row.

Delegation Arrivals —
Commercial and Private

Arrivals are where delegation movements most often come apart, because the people meeting the aircraft and the people running the schedule are rarely the same people. Tell us at inquiry which of these you are dealing with and we plan to it.

Alongside a Security Detail

Some delegations travel with their own security, whether a mission’s own officers, a contracted detail, or a US protective element. When they do, the division of responsibility needs stating plainly, because the most common failure is a transport provider that assumes the wrong role.

The detail owns the security plan. We own the vehicles and the driving. That means the detail decides routes, timings, stopping points and who travels in which vehicle, and we brief our chauffeurs to those instructions and execute them — we do not substitute our own judgement for a protective decision, and we do not represent ourselves as providing protection. Where a detail wants to speak to the chauffeurs directly before a movement, we arrange it.

Equally, many delegations travel with no security element at all and want the movement to look entirely unremarkable — unmarked black vehicles, no livery, no signage, and chauffeurs who do not discuss who they are carrying. If your requirement is discretion rather than protection, say so at inquiry, because they call for different handling.

Interpreters, Luggage
& Multi-Day Visits

A delegation is rarely just principals. The details that get overlooked at booking are usually the ones that cause problems on the day.

Diplomatic & Delegation
Transport FAQs

Anything not covered here, call (202) 929-9595 or submit the inquiry form above. Pricing for individual journeys is on the rates page.