10, 13 and 17 Seater Urbania in Chennai

Chennai is our registered base and the busiest Urbania hub we run, which means most of what we know about operating a long vehicle in this city was learned the hard way. The single most common problem is not the vehicle or the route — it is the pickup. A 17 seater Urbania is a little under seven metres long, and a great many Chennai residential streets, particularly in older parts of Mylapore, Triplicane and West Mambalam, simply will not take it without a reversing manoeuvre that blocks the lane for ten minutes. We will look at your pickup address before confirming and, if it is tight, ask to meet you at the nearest main road instead. That conversation is easier the day before than at six in the morning with a family and luggage waiting.

The second thing worth planning around is Chennai's own traffic rather than the highway. Getting out of the city is usually the slowest part of any trip. Leaving towards Tirupati or Bangalore, the GST Road and Poonamallee High Road corridors are congested from roughly seven in the morning; heading south on OMR or the ECR, the bottleneck is the stretch through Thiruvanmiyur and Sholinganallur. For an early start we will normally suggest being on the road before half past five, which sounds severe until you compare it with the alternative of losing two hours before Tambaram.

For seating, the honest advice is that the 13 seater is the right answer far more often than people expect. A group of nine or ten in a 13 seater has a full row free for bags, which matters on a multi-day trip; the same group in a 10 seater is comfortable in the seats but fighting for boot space by the second day. The 17 seater is genuinely useful above thirteen passengers and genuinely awkward below it, because the extra length costs you on exactly the narrow approaches Chennai is full of. If you are between two sizes and carrying heavy luggage, take the larger one.

All hire is chauffeur-driven. We do not offer self-drive on the Urbania and would not want to: it is a commercial vehicle with a long wheelbase and a high centre of gravity, and the difference between someone who has driven one on a ghat road and someone who has not is not a matter of confidence. Our chauffeurs work these routes regularly, which is also why they know which fuel stops have space to turn a seventeen seater around.