We booked the first two days the ordinary way, one transfer at a time, because that is how we have always travelled. Airport to hotel. Hotel to the next town. A different car each morning and a different man holding a sign with our surname spelled slightly wrong. Between the second booking and the third, we asked whether it would be simpler to keep the same driver for the rest of the week. It was. That is most of the review, but it took us seven days in Bosnia and Herzegovina to work out why.
What follows is not a route guide. The drive times are everywhere: Sarajevo to Mostar is around 130 kilometres and a little over two hours on the M17, longer if you take the pretty way past Jablanica lake. What almost nobody writes about is the difference between six separate transactions and one continuous arrangement — the same car, the same man, every morning, until he knows how you travel better than you do.
Day One: A Stranger With Our Luggage in His Boot
Our driver was called Emir. He was somewhere in his fifties, dressed better than we were, and he did the thing good drivers do at arrivals: took the heavy bag without asking, then said nothing for ten minutes while we found our bearings. The car was a dark saloon, spotless in the way that means someone cleans it daily rather than weekly, cold air already running before we got in.
The booking had not been a checkout button. You send an enquiry describing what you want, and a price comes back for the vehicle, fixed, not per head. We went back and forth twice by email before anything was confirmed, which felt slow at the time and sensible afterwards, because the person answering was clearly reading what we wrote rather than pasting a template. If you want to book an airport transfer in ninety seconds at two in the morning, this company is not built for that. If you want a week planned by someone who will then have to drive it, the enquiry format starts to make sense.
Day one was a transfer and nothing more: airport, city, done. We tipped, said thank you, and assumed that was the relationship. The next morning the same car was outside the hotel at the time we had asked for, and Emir remembered which of us had taken the front seat. Small thing. It is the accumulation of small things that this review is actually about.
What Changes When It Is the Same Car Every Morning
What we ended up buying from Balkan Chauffeur was not a package with a name. It was a driver and a car for seven days, priced per vehicle, shaped around what we told them we wanted to see, and adjusted on the road as we went. The difference that makes only shows up slowly.
The first real change was physical. One of us gets carsick, badly, on anything that winds — and a great deal of Bosnia winds. On the third day we drove up onto Bjelašnica towards Lukomir, which is about ninety minutes from Sarajevo and finishes with roughly sixteen kilometres of gravel at nearly 1,500 metres, potholed and slow and turning back on itself constantly. We had said nothing. About twenty minutes in, Emir caught something in the mirror, pulled over at a wide spot without comment, opened both rear windows and swapped the seating so the queasy one of us was in front. He then drove the rest of it noticeably differently: slower into the bends, off the brakes earlier, taking the crown of the road where he could.
Nobody had told him. He had been in the car with us for three days and had watched. For the rest of the week, on any road with switchbacks, the front seat was assumed to be taken and the windows came down before we asked. On one leg he offered a longer paved route instead of a shorter mountain one, laid out the trade, and let us choose. A driver you meet at eight and leave at eleven cannot do any of that.
The second change was rhythm. By day four the mornings had a shape nobody had negotiated. Coffee around ten, wherever we happened to be, because he had learned we get unpleasant without it. Photo stops taken as given rather than requested. And a tolerance for the fact that we like to be quiet early on — he talked when we talked and drove in silence when we did not, which sounds like nothing and is the hardest thing to get right in a job like his. On the drive down to Trebinje we both fell asleep, which is not something we do in strangers’ cars.
The third change was that we stopped planning. By midweek the daily conversation was about a minute long: here is roughly what we fancy, what do you think. He would say that Kravice is worth it at half past eight and not at midday when four coaches arrive, or that we would enjoy Počitelj more if we climbed it before the heat. We took his version almost every time and were never wrong to.
That timing advice matters more than it sounds in high season: the Agency for Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina recorded 245,970 tourist arrivals in August 2025 alone, with foreign visitors accounting for 75.2% of all overnight stays.
The Local Knowledge You Cannot Book in Advance
This is the part that is hard to buy any other way. Emir had driven these roads for years and had opinions about all of them, delivered without the performance of a guide.
He knew which viewpoints above the Neretva were worth stopping at and which were a gap in the barrier with a bin. He stopped at Konjic for the old Ottoman bridge and the trout, and near Jablanica for spit-roasted lamb, having first said which of the lamb places on that stretch he would not eat at. In Mostar he steered us off a restaurant near the Old Bridge that we had shortlisted — fine food, he said, double the price for the view — and named somewhere ten minutes uphill where we had the best meal of the trip. At Blagaj he told us to go before the tour groups, then sat with a coffee while we did.
He also knew the roads as roads. Where the M17 backs up behind lorries at the tunnels. What time the road up from the coast fills with day-trip traffic. Twice he reordered a day’s stops on the move, explained why in one sentence, and saved us an hour we would never have known we had lost.
None of this is in the service description. It is what happens when the man driving you has a stake in your week going well, because he is in it until Saturday.
Four Things We Would Change
We should be straight about the annoyances, because a review that finds nothing wrong after seven days is not a review. None of the following came close to spoiling the week, and we are listing them because we would have wanted to know.
The water is stingy
Balkan Chauffeur’s standard provision is one small bottle of water per passenger for the journey. On a thirty-degree day in Herzegovina, with three stops and a lot of walking between them, that is not enough water, and for what the week costs it felt mean. We bought our own at petrol stations, which is hardly a catastrophe, but it is a strange thing to have to do in a car you have hired for the day.
Here is the part that stayed with us. On the third afternoon Emir clocked that we were unimpressed — we had said nothing beyond a dry remark between ourselves — and from the next morning the cool box in the boot was full. Not one bottle each: proper cold water, restocked every day, and on two occasions fruit. He bought it himself, out of his own money, and never once mentioned it or invited us to notice. When we eventually thanked him he changed the subject. The company’s policy is stingy. The man driving for them was not, and he covered the gap personally rather than let it sit there. That was the most telling hour of the week, and it says something good about who they hire and something less good about what they hand him to work with.
He is never actually at the car
Every time we stopped — a town, a viewpoint, an hour over lunch — we had to either give Emir a rough finishing time in advance or ring him about ten minutes before we wanted to leave, because he would be in the nearest café rather than sitting in the vehicle. In thirty-degree heat, waiting in a parked car for two hours is not a reasonable thing to expect of anybody, and we never once resented him for it. But it quietly removes the thing you half expect when you are paying for a private car, which is walking back and simply getting in. Instead there is a small piece of admin attached to every stop, and on the days we misjudged how long we wanted somewhere it meant standing in the sun for a few minutes with the bags. Mildly irritating, entirely understandable, and worth knowing about rather than discovering.
The Wi-Fi is conditional
The car has Wi-Fi. It worked well in some places and not at all in others, because the connection rides on a mobile network and roaming changes what it can do. Nobody misled us, but it appears in the list of what you get without an asterisk, and in practice it is a feature that comes and goes with geography. If you plan to work from the back seat, download what you need beforehand and treat any signal as a bonus.
One hour at a border
On the crossing towards the coast, our car was directed out of the queue and gone through in detail. Documents taken away and brought back, the boot opened, questions to Emir and then to us. It took the better part of an hour while private cars in the next lane handed over passports and were gone inside a minute. Nothing about the vehicle announces what it is — there are no logos and no livery — but the combination is legible to anyone whose job it is to read it: the class of car, the plates, a driver up front with paying passengers and luggage behind, and the folder of paperwork that comes with a licensed passenger-transport job. Officials recognise the arrangement, not a sign on the door. It takes so long because commercial passenger transport is regulated differently in each country here — permits, authorisations, rules about what a licensed operator may do once it has crossed a frontier — so the documents that satisfy inspectors on one side are not the ones inspectors on the other side want to see. Emir was weary rather than annoyed, and had clearly explained the same papers many times. Worth knowing: if you have a flight on the far side, build in the hour.
Would We Book It Again?
Yes, and we would book the whole week from the start rather than easing into it.
On cost, the honest answer is that it depends entirely on your group. The price is quoted per vehicle rather than per person, so the arithmetic swings hard on how many of you there are and how much luggage you have:
- For two people on a single short hop, it is dearer than the bus and roughly what a fair taxi would be — you are paying for the car, the door, and the driver’s day, not for a seat.
- For three or four with luggage, it starts to look obvious, because the price does not change when you add people.
- For a full week with a dedicated driver, compare it against a hire car plus fuel, parking and paperwork, then add the value of not driving mountain roads yourself.
- If your trip is one airport run and nothing else, book the airport run and stop there.
What Balkan Chauffeur sells as a multi-day private tour is really the removal of a whole category of decision. For seven days we did not think about parking, fuel, tolls, which of us was driving, or how to get down from a village 1,500 metres by dark. The car was clean every morning, the timekeeping exact, and Emir’s English better than our Bosnian by a distance none of us mentioned.
Would we call it flawless? No. The water policy is tight-fisted, the Wi-Fi promises more than the geography delivers, you are never quite done with a stop until you have phoned for the car, and one frontier took an hour out of our last full day. If any of that had defined the week we would have written that instead, and we would not have needed a paragraph to soften it.
But they did not define it. What defined it was a man who noticed on day three that one of us goes green on switchbacks, and who quietly started buying us water rather than explaining the policy. We shook hands with Emir at the end of it and it felt like saying goodbye to someone rather than closing a booking. That is the argument for keeping one driver for a week, and no amount of individually optimised transfers gets you there.
The Last Drive
By the last morning, the car no longer felt like a transfer. It felt like part of the trip itself. We knew where the bags would go, who would sit in front, when we would stop for coffee and roughly how long the next road would take. Emir knew the small things too: when one of us needed the window open, which viewpoints we would want to photograph and when we were happier, left alone.
That was the part we had not expected when we booked the first journey. A private driver is easy to measure in kilometres and cost, but the useful thing after seven days was everything that stopped needing to be discussed.
We arrived thinking we were paying someone to drive us around Bosnia and Herzegovina. We left understanding that, for a trip like ours, we were really paying to make the journey between places simpler. The car was the service. The familiarity was the reason we would book it again.
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