Luxury & Exotic Car Rental at LAX (Los Angeles International Airport)

Two ways out of the airport, and what each one costs

Standard delivery is $150 both ways. The car is left in the airport parking structure, you are told exactly where it is standing, and you ride the free airport shuttle out to collect it. It is the cheaper answer and it is the slower one: allow about half an hour between the terminal door and the driver's seat, and allow more patience than that if you are travelling with four large cases, because the cases ride the bus with you.

VIP delivery is $300 both ways, and it is the one to take on the way in. The car comes to the terminal. You collect your bags, walk out, and somebody is standing there with it; the handover runs about five minutes and the half hour never happens. No shuttle, no lot, no walk at the end of a long-haul.

Both figures are for the round trip, and each leg is its own choice in the booking form — $75 a direction for the structure, $150 for the terminal. The walk that matters is the one you make with the luggage after eleven hours in the air, and that is the leg the terminal tier takes off your hands.

With a convertible or a coupé, take the terminal delivery — or take the SUV to the airport and the convertible in town the next morning, which is how these weeks usually run.

Nothing else moves. Delivery to our partner Beverly Hills hotels is complimentary, collection from the Robertson Boulevard office is free, and any other address in greater Los Angeles is quoted with the car. Pick which of the two you want at LAX for each leg in the booking form — or tell us when you send the flight number — and the figure goes into the quote with everything else, before anything is committed.

What actually happens at the kerb

Send the flight number when you book. We watch the flight rather than the clock, so two hours lost out of Heathrow, or a diversion to Ontario, moves our timing and not your reservation — and that holds whichever delivery you have taken. On the terminal one the car is staged near the airport for your landing rather than dispatched when you ring; when you have your bags you send one text, and it is at the arrivals kerb of your terminal a few minutes later.

Los Angeles International Airport limits how long any vehicle may stand at that kerb, so the exact door is settled by text on the day rather than printed on a voucher — the car works the horseshoe rather than parks in it, and the handover itself takes about five minutes. Licence, signature, keys, cases in the boot.

There is no counter in the transaction on either tier: on the standard tier you are told where the car stands before you board the shuttle. What we have is a car that comes to the terminal you are already standing outside — Terminals 1 through 8, or Tom Bradley if you came in from abroad — or, for half the fee, one waiting at the other end of a shuttle ride. Returning works the same way in reverse and is priced the same way in reverse: name the departure and we collect from the terminal, the hotel, or wherever the last night of the trip ends.

Luggage decides this, not horsepower

Four adults off a European long-haul land with four large cases and four cabin bags between them, and a full-size luxury SUV meets that flight; the coupé is delivered to the hotel the next morning. A low car takes two soft bags and a coat, and it takes them beautifully.

Say how many people and how many bags when you enquire. It is one line, and it decides the delivery as well as the car: the more bags there are, the more obviously the terminal option earns the difference. Where the party runs past five, one large vehicle beats a convoy of small ones: everybody stays on the same timeline, and the cases go in the back instead of on someone's knees.

Late flights, and very late ones

A car is delivered to LAX at any hour of the night. A 1am landing out of Sydney or Doha is an ordinary arrival here and so is a 4am one; what it needs is to be on the reservation, arranged before you fly rather than phoned in from the air.

The booking form offers pick-up every half hour between 7am and 9pm, and that grid is the self-serve window rather than the hours we work — most of the arrivals board fits inside it and the red-eyes do not, which is the whole of the difference. Ask for the hour when you book and it is set up then.

After midnight, take the terminal tier for the arrival. Standard delivery leaves the car in the airport parking structure and you take the shuttle out to it, which is half an hour and a walk with your luggage; the VIP tier puts the car at the terminal with somebody standing beside it, for $150 on that leg rather than $75. At two in the morning, with cases, that is the tier to take.

The same is true of the arrival that moves. Because the flight number is what we are watching, a delay is our scheduling problem and not yours; nobody at this end is working from the time printed on your itinerary. You do not need to ring ahead from the air to tell us the aircraft is late. We already know.

Black, white, or the roof down

Colour comes up more on arrivals than on any other booking, usually because somebody is being met and somebody else has an opinion about it. A black car is the discreet answer; a white one holds up far better under a Los Angeles summer and is the one asked for by name in July. A good part of the fleet comes both ways — the Rolls-Royce Cullinan in black and in white, the Rolls-Royce Dawn in black and in matte white, and the Range Rover Sport, the BMW X5, the BMW 7 Series and the Mercedes GLC in either. Say which you want and we will tell you whether that car is free in that colour on your dates.

A convertible is its own question at an airport. It is one of the best cars in Los Angeles to spend a week in, and its boot takes a weekend rather than a wardrobe, so plenty of arrivals are booked as two cars: an SUV for the airport run and the cases, and a convertible collected in town the next morning, once the luggage is upstairs and CA-1 up the coast is the only thing left on the list.

A muscle car from LAX is the same booking as any other car on this page: the Ford Mustang Convertible is on its own page with its calendar, delivered to the terminal or left in the parking structure on the same two tiers, with a boot that takes two cases rather than four. If the week is the coast road and the airport is only where it starts, it is the car for it.

Or make an entrance

There is the other kind of arrival — the one where somebody is being met, or the trip starts the moment the doors open. A Rolls-Royce at the kerb is a different proposition from a car that merely works, and after the seven-seaters it is the most-requested thing on this page.

The rest of the exotic fleet meets flights too, and more often than the photographs suggest. A Lamborghini Urus or a Bentley Bentayga carries the luggage of an ordinary large SUV and none of the anonymity; a Mercedes-AMG G 63 does the same thing in a straighter line; a Maybach GLS 600 is the quiet one. Where the car you want is a Huracan or a Ferrari 488 — two seats, and a boot the size of a boot — the usual arrangement is four doors to meet the flight and the exotic delivered to the hotel the next morning, both quoted together before either is committed.

Take it with a driver if the flight was long enough that nobody wants the 405. It is the same booking, the same flight tracking and the same kerb; the only difference is which seat you get in, and whether the first hour in Los Angeles is spent on the phone or on the freeway. Both versions run through the same reservation, and both are quoted in full before anything is committed.

Driven, the arrival is a block rather than a drop: the driver is at arrivals with your name on a card, and the car stays with you for the hours that follow — the hotel, the first meeting, lunch — rather than leaving at the kerb. That is the shape on the Los Angeles airport chauffeur service page, where the same cars go out with a driver from $100 an hour on a two-hour minimum, the car at its own daily rate as a second line.

Where we deliver from LAX

Pick-up and return are separate fields in the booking form, which matters more on an airport rental than anywhere else: take the car at LAX and give it back at your Beverly Hills hotel, or start in town and hand it over at the terminal on your way out. Cars are delivered across the Westside and the South Bay as a matter of course — Santa Monica, Venice, Marina del Rey, Manhattan Beach, Bel-Air — and out to Pasadena, Long Beach, Pomona and Orange County when the trip goes that way. Delivery is complimentary at our partner hotels there, published at the airport — $150 both ways with the car in the parking structure, $300 both ways to the terminal, half that for one direction — and quoted with the car for any other address.

The Westside is the short half of that list, and it is the half LAX is genuinely closest to. Venice and Marina del Rey are a quarter of an hour up Lincoln; Manhattan Beach and the South Bay about the same going the other way; Santa Monica twenty minutes on a civil afternoon. If the week is a Venice Beach week, or a beach-house week anywhere between Playa del Rey and Palos Verdes, the car is at the door before the aircraft has finished unloading. Beverly Hills and Bel-Air are the climb up the 405 — half an hour when that road is behaving and considerably longer when it is not, which is precisely why the delivery is timed to the aircraft and not to the hour.

Further out, the map still holds. Long Beach and the harbour, Pomona and Pasadena inland, and Orange County — Anaheim, Irvine and the coast below them — are delivered from the airport as routine rather than as a favour, and collected from the same address at the end of the trip. Say where you are actually staying when you enquire rather than after: it changes which car we suggest more often than the number of days does.

The same flight-tracked arrangement covers Hollywood Burbank (BUR) and Santa Monica (SMO), and private terminals at any of the three; the two tiers above are LAX's own, and delivery to the other two airports is quoted with the car. Burbank is worth considering if your itinerary allows it — it is a fifteen-minute airport at both ends and the drive into town is shorter than the LAX exit road on a bad evening. If you want the mechanics in more detail before you commit, the LAX delivery guide walks through the kerbside timing and the documents; otherwise browse the drives and routes around Los Angeles puts the airports beside the roads they lead to. See the whole Nizo fleet and send the flight, and we will come back with a car and a time.

What LAX clients rent for

The bookings this page mostly takes arrive in four shapes. A visitor who lands and wants the week's car waiting rather than queued for, which is the ordinary one — on a passport and a home licence, as set out on renting with a foreign licence. A crew or a family landing together with cases, where one vehicle replaces three and keeps everybody on one schedule. An arrival where the car is the point — a birthday, an anniversary, a client being collected — and the terminal kerb is where it has to happen, which is what the terminal tier is for. And the outbound half of a trip that started in town: the car is handed back at the terminal on the way out rather than driven somewhere first.

What none of them is: a counter, a shuttle and a queue at the end of a flight. That hour is the thing being bought back, and both tiers delete some of it — the structure removes the counter, the terminal removes the walk as well.

Landing on business — a week of meetings, a team arriving for a client, an executive who would rather be driven from the terminal — is its own page: corporate car service and rental, with the account, the billing and a chauffeured day priced out.