This is the single most important line on this page, so it goes first. HSB Sedan Service Inc gives 60 minutes of complimentary wait time at Reagan National, and the clock starts when your flight is gated.

Not at the scheduled arrival time. Not at touchdown. At gate-in — the moment the aircraft is parked and the door is about to open.

That distinction is worth understanding, because most operators do it the other way. They start counting at the flight’s scheduled arrival. If your flight pushes back two hours in Chicago, your grace period has already expired before you have left the ground, and the wait charges begin accruing for a delay you had no part in. Starting the clock at gate-in means the 60 minutes are actually yours: time to walk the concourse, clear baggage claim, take a phone call, and find your car without watching the meter.

We also track the flight in both directions. Delay handling is standard across the industry; early arrival handling is not. If a tailwind puts you on the ground 35 minutes ahead of schedule, the chauffeur is moved up with you rather than arriving at the original time to find you already waiting. Both halves are automatic and neither needs a phone call from you.

Greeter service from the gate deserves a sentence of its own, because almost no car service in the Washington market offers it. Standard meet-and-greet means someone waiting at baggage claim or arrivals. Gate greeter means someone standing at the end of the jet bridge as the door opens. For a first-time visitor, an older traveller, someone connecting under pressure, or anyone arriving into Terminal 2 and facing a long concourse walk, it removes the entire navigation problem. It is available at DCA on request when you book.

Reagan National re-signed its terminals in June 2022, and the old letters have never really gone away. Passengers, hotel concierges and corporate travel desks still say “Terminal B” and “Terminal C” every day. Our dispatchers answer in whichever vocabulary you use, but here is the translation, because knowing it prevents the most common pickup mistake at this airport.

In short: the original Terminal A became Terminal 1, and the much larger 1997 building that everyone knew as Terminals B and C became a single Terminal 2 containing Concourses B, C, D and E. Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 are separate buildings with separate kerbs, which is exactly why the naming matters — a car sent to the wrong one is not a short walk away.

Gate numbers changed with the signage. Every gate now carries its concourse letter, so what used to be Gate 23 is now C23. If you read us your gate number from your boarding pass, that letter tells us which concourse you are walking out of, and we do not have to guess.

When you book, the most useful thing you can give us is your airline and flight number. We derive the terminal and concourse from it, and we re-derive it if the airline reassigns your gate while you are in the air — which at DCA happens more often than most travellers realise.

Every DCA transfer is quoted as a flat rate, confirmed in writing before the ride. It includes the vehicle, the chauffeur, airport fees, tolls, taxes and gratuity. There is no surge pricing, no per-minute meter and no fuel surcharge, and a flight delay does not change the figure you agreed. Rates depend on vehicle class, pickup point and time, so we quote per itinerary rather than publishing a table that would be wrong for half of the people reading it.

See the full HSB fleet, or set up billing through a corporate account if your company books DCA transfers regularly.

Reagan National sits in Arlington, Virginia, directly across the Potomac from the city — the closest of the three Washington airports to downtown DC by a wide margin, and the reason it is the default choice for anyone with a meeting on the Hill, in the East End or in Crystal City. Dulles and BWI are both an order of magnitude further out. If your schedule is tight, DCA is almost always the right airport, and our comparison of the three DC airports covers the cases where it is not.

Being that close to the city has a consequence worth planning around: DCA transfers are short, so they are dominated almost entirely by bridge and parkway conditions rather than by distance. The George Washington Memorial Parkway and the 14th Street Bridge corridor carry nearly all DCA traffic into the District, and both are directional — they load heavily inbound in the morning and outbound in the evening. A transfer that is quick at 10am and quick again at 8pm can be materially slower at 5.30pm, even though the mileage never changes. The same is true of the Pentagon and Crystal City approaches during federal shift changes.

This is why we build the buffer from the live flight and the live road rather than from a fixed table. On departures, we set the pickup time from your terminal, your checked-bag situation and the hour you are travelling, and we would rather you were comfortably early than technically on time.

Late-night arrivals are covered. The last bank of flights into DCA lands close to the airport’s curfew, and the terminal thins out quickly afterwards — which is precisely when a pre-assigned chauffeur with your name and number matters most. The 60-minute gate-in window and the greeter option both apply on a midnight arrival exactly as they do at midday.

Flying private? We cover the general aviation side of the field as well — see Atlantic Aviation DCA black car service for FBO pickups.