Rugby has its own hospital for local clinics and a fifteen mile run into Coventry for everything else. Both are pre-booked with a named DBS-checked driver and a price agreed before travel.
Worth settling before you ring, because it saves everyone a wasted call.
A private hire operator licensed by Coventry City Council. Every journey is pre-booked with a named driver assigned in advance and a price agreed before travel. Drivers are DBS-checked. We hold transport contracts with Warwickshire County Council.
Hampton Travel is not an ambulance service, and is not CQC-registered non-emergency patient transport. We do not carry stretcher patients and provide no clinical care during the journey. If a passenger needs medical supervision in transit, that is an NHS or private ambulance job and we will tell you so rather than take the booking.
What we cover is the ground in between: a passenger who is medically stable but cannot drive, cannot manage the bus, and should not be left to a taxi app at eight in the morning on the day of an appointment.
Rugby patients usually have two destinations, not one, and that is the thing most transport arrangements get wrong.
Hospital of St Cross on Barby Road is run by the same trust as UHCW and handles a good deal of outpatient, diagnostic and day case work locally. For a Rugby resident that is a short, straightforward journey.
What catches people out is the referral into University Hospital Coventry and Warwickshire at Walsgrave for anything St Cross does not do. That is roughly fifteen miles each way, largely on the A428 and M6, and it turns a local appointment into a half-day round trip. For someone who has stopped driving, it is also the journey the family cannot always cover on a weekday morning.
Tell us which of the two you are going to when you book. They are different journeys with different timings and we plan them differently.
Rugby sits at the eastern edge of Warwickshire, further from Coventry than most of the county and served by a bus network built around the town centre rather than around Walsgrave. A hospital trip by public transport from an outlying CV23 village can mean two buses and a walk at each end, which is not a realistic proposition before a 9am appointment or afterwards on a bad day.
That is the practical reason this service exists here rather than a marketing one. The distance is the problem, and a pre-booked door to door journey removes it.
Dialysis and oncology courses mean the same journey several times a week for months. Over that many repetitions, two things matter more than price: the car arriving when it said it would, and it being the same driver.
We allocate driver continuity on recurring runs wherever the rota allows. Ask for it at the booking stage.
"Wheelchair accessible" is used loosely across the trade. Ask any operator these four questions, including us.
Side-loading ramp taking a powered or non-folding chair into the vehicle, rather than a folded manual chair in the boot.
Anchored to the vehicle floor, to M1 standard. Not straps improvised on the day.
A three-point lap and shoulder belt for the passenger, in addition to the chair restraint.
The driver knows the restraint procedure. You should not be talking them through it at the kerb.
Our vehicle meets all four. It is a single vehicle, so accessible bookings in Rugby need more notice than standard ones.
If the passenger can move from chair to seat, the driver assists and stows the chair. If they travel in the chair, the driver secures it and helps with the belt.
Drivers do not perform lift transfers. That is the correct position rather than a reluctant one. No insured private hire driver should be manually lifting a passenger, and done badly it injures both people. A lift needs trained mobility staff or a family member present.
This is the single most common problem on the day, so settle it when you book rather than on the driveway. Tell us who is doing the lift if one is needed.
None of it is compulsory. All of it makes the day go better.
Notice: 24 hours for a routine journey, 48 hours for a hospital appointment so the driver can be held to the slot.
Built for anyone booking the same journeys over and over: care homes, families managing a course of treatment, and clinics arranging transport on a patient's behalf.
added to top-ups from £2,500. Put in £2,500, get £2,700 of travel.
added to top-ups from £5,000. Put in £5,000, get £5,500 of travel.
to use the credit. Your own topped-up balance does not expire.
The credit is the obvious part. The reason care homes actually move onto an account is the admin. One balance covers every resident, so there is no card handed to a driver, no petty cash, no staff member paying and claiming it back, and no pile of receipts to match up at the end of the month.
You get a statement showing every journey with the date, the passenger and the destination against it. That is the same record the council asks us for on our contract work, and it is the thing that turns an awkward question into a two-minute answer.
For a family, it works the same way on a smaller scale. If someone is booked in for a course of treatment over several months, you top up once and stop thinking about paying for individual journeys while there are more important things going on.
Every journey still comes off at the price agreed when it was booked. The credit is on top of the balance, not a discount applied to a moving rate.
To be plain about the twelve months, because it is the part people misread: the deadline applies only to the credit we add, not to the money you put in. Your own balance stays on the account until you spend it. If credit is still sitting there after twelve months it drops off, and the cash you deposited is untouched. Journeys draw from the credit first, so in normal use it is spent long before the date matters.
Call 0800 061 4661 and describe the journey. If we are not the right service for it we will say so.