Car service replaces airplanes for a few Longboaters

To survive the pandemic, Longboat Limousine recently stretched the meaning of the ‘customer is always right’ so far it ended up in Ohio.

As in a two-man crew from the private car and transportation service recently drove a Longboat Key resident 970 miles to Cincinnati. The crew stopped only for gas, snacks and drinks — no hotel stays on the one-way, 25-hour trip.

 “Some people feel more comfortable in one of our cars than a crowded plane,” Longboat Limousine President Jimmy Seaton said. “It was a first-class ride.”

Other pandemic-prompted trips are in the works for similar-minded Longboaters, Seaton said, one to Kansas City and one to St. Louis. He’s done a few out-of-state trips before, but interest in the journeys are up as people scramble to get to seasonal homes amid flight cancelations, delays and unease about air travel caused by the coronavirus pandemic. 

'People really know they can count on us. If we say we are going to be somewhere by 4 p.m., we are there at 3:45.' Jimmy Seaton 

Business at Longboat Limousine is down, as much as 20% over the summer, after days in April where Seaton said “we literally had zero rides.” But Seaton said his focus is looking forward, on what he can do to serve current customers and convince others Longboat Limousine offers a clean — and safe — ride.

That includes a series of stringent cleaning protocols. Crews spray down constantly, before and after rides, and everyone wears face masks. Trips with multiple people are seated socially-distanced.

Seaton even took away the luxury magazines and copies of the Longboat Observer he kept in the backseat for passengers, so germs can’t pass through the pages. 

In another clean-focused move, he’s using his mostly idle fleet of 12 vehicles, down from 16 pre-pandemic, to ensure each car is rotated at least daily and passengers don’t get a ride in a car someone else was just in. “I want to eliminate the mindset of a taxi cab,” Seaton said, “where someone was in the vehicle 10 minutes ago.”

Citing privacy, Seaton declined to disclose the name of the client who got the ride to Cincinnati. In addition to the other pending rides out of Florida, the company recently drove someone to Miami so he could check in on some real estate properties he owns there. The service left Longboat at 9 a.m., drove around to the sites in Miami and was back in Longboat by 9 p.m.

A former corporate trainer for Publix and, before that, head of beverage and food at the Longboat Hilton, Seaton hopes the interest in long trips grows, given the uncertainty in airlines. That’s why he tells his crew, down to four employees from 15 pre-pandemic, to put customer service above all else. “People really know they can count on us,” Seaton said. “If we say we are going to be somewhere by 4 p.m., we are there at 3:45.”  

While Seaton constantly communicates with customers to see what he can do for them — and where Longboat Limousine can drive them — even he has limits: a client recently asked if he would pick up a friend at Tampa International Airport coming in from Houston.

When Seaton learned the friend originally was coming from a flight from Brazil, where the coronavirus is largely uncontrolled, he politely turned down the work.