This company would agree to pick up the client and X amount of baggage at a specific date, time, and location, and drop them off at a specific date, time, and location. Nothing in between would necessarily be guaranteed except human dignity. They may pick you up with a shuttle bus. They may send an Uber. Or a flying bathtub. They may (probably will) drive you to a bus station and give you a ticket. They may take you to the airport. Whichever route is least expensive and fits the luggage, class, and time requirements would be chosen.
The company would offer complete end-to-end service from and to anywhere on the planet allowed by law. Obviously shorter travel times would frequently necessitate air travel, raising the total ticket price for those tickets.
Classes of service would also be available. A first class ticket could put you in a luxury RV for a drive across the country, or the nicest available train car, or a first class air ticket depending on which costs the least.
This smooths out the market, allowing efficient price connectivity between competing travel companies.-- Voice, Jan 20 2018 Uk emergency ambulance service is a bit like this, to my recollection. Once when I kept fainting and seemed to be about to die from food poisoning someone who should have known better (ok it was me) panicked, and called an ambulance, then felt much better and v.v. guilty. I needn’t have felt so bad as the emergency guy came on a bicycle with an orange back-pack, talked to me through letterbox and went away. Kind of the ‘placebo’ of ambulances. I think they must know by instinct when you are really dying ..-- DDRopDeadly, Jan 20 2018 Comprehensively Baked by British Railways in Ye Goode Olde Days ...
If you bought a ticket from Station A to Station B, they undertook to "convey" you.
They didn't specify how, or when. All they did was agree to move you, with bag and/or baggage*, from A to B.
If this involved you sitting on your suitcase on a freezing station approach for hours (sometimes days) without food, water, shelter or toilet facilities, waiting for a superannuated ox-cart to convey you to some patch of bleak, windswept moorland where you transfer to an open-backed unsprung truck, fuelled by coke, with solid tyres, captured from the Germans in WW1 and cunningly engineered so as to attract copious amounts if sleet from all points of the compass onto the unfortunate occupants, then bounced over unpaved tracks for several days without respite until finally being pitchforked out - suffering from exposure, dehydration, malnutrition and multiple** contusions and abrasions - within crawling distance of the "destination" - then the contract had been fulfilled.
If you hadn't paid the premium for First Class, gods help you - that was a lot worse ...
*Depending on your marital status.
**According to Pterry, "Nothing 'multiple' is ever good".-- 8th of 7, Jan 20 2018 //"Nothing 'multiple' is ever good".// There are known counterexamples.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 20 2018 Cite your sources, [MB].-- 8th of 7, Jan 20 2018 //nothing ..guaranteed except human dignity// but in the next breath you say Uber and the flying bathtub..-- DDRopDeadly, Jan 20 2018 BR didn't acknowledge "human dignity" as a concept worthy of consideration ...-- 8th of 7, Jan 20 2018 //Cite your sources, [MB].// A gentleman never reveals his sources. But she seemed quite happy.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 20 2018 [8th] why do I suddenly picture that truck-thing you have to pump up and down to travel the rails in black and white films?-- DDRopDeadly, Jan 20 2018 [MB] why do I suddenly picture you pumping up and down on a lady on a truck-thing?-- DDRopDeadly, Jan 20 2018 // that truck-thing you have to pump up and down to travel the rails in black and white films? //
Because that was BR's idea of "affordable mass transportation" ... for proles.-- 8th of 7, Jan 20 2018 What if my desired time of arrival is earlier than my desired time of departure? Would I be picked up by a Terminator robot, by a Gallifreyan, or what?-- goldbb, Jan 23 2018 random, halfbakery