What rail and air never count
On Nice to Milan or Nice to Geneva, the honest comparison is not flight time. It is the whole chain: reach the airport, check in, wait, land, collect the bags, then arrange another transfer to the real address. The flight takes an hour and the journey takes half a day.
A car with a chauffeur inverts that arithmetic. It is slower in raw speed and faster door to door, because it removes two transfers and one wait. It also has a weakness worth stating: for one passenger travelling light, it costs more than the train, and the train is the better choice.
Milan: two zones, two logics, one ticket
Milan layers two rules that are routinely confused. Area C is a charged limited-traffic zone, live all year Monday to Friday from 7.30 am to 7.30 pm, public holidays excluded. The daily ticket is 7.50 EUR and covers every entry that day. A weekend run into the centre needs no ticket at all.
Area B costs nothing but bans. Live at the same hours and marked by 186 access gates, it excludes whole vehicle categories, including Euro 5 diesel passenger cars, already prohibited. No ticket buys that back, and the zone covers most of the city, so it cannot be driven around.
One point to verify rather than assume: the Area C exemption for chauffeur-driven cars of up to nine seats is not automatic because a vehicle is licensed. It is attached to a registered plate. Without registration the daily ticket is due and belongs in the quote.
Geneva: your sector decides the route
Geneva airport has two entrances that do not connect on foot. The France sector is reachable only by the customs road from Ferney-Voltaire, which is closed to pedestrians and cyclists. Only passengers holding a valid ticket for the same day, give or take one, may move between sectors at all.
The consequence is blunt: you need to know before leaving Nice which side your flight is handled on. Getting it wrong cannot be fixed on arrival. For a pickup, the free drop-off lane does not help either, since even a short stop is forbidden there: you have to enter a paying car park, and therefore pass under a height limit, with posted heights ranging from 1.90 m to 2.80 m by structure.
Crossing a border in 2026
France notified a temporary reintroduction of internal border checks from 1 May to 31 October 2026, covering all land, air and sea borders with its neighbours, Italy and Switzerland among them. In practice that means a valid identity document within reach for every passenger, children included.
The Swiss vignette deserves its own line. It costs 40 francs, covers 1 December to 31 January of the following year, and there is no daily, weekly or monthly version. It is due even for the last few kilometres of Swiss motorway before Geneva.
Why the fare is confirmed rather than posted
Past 250 km the engine stops posting a fixed fare and opens a quote request answered within the hour. The threshold protects you first: at this range a geocoding error would produce an absurd figure, and an unanticipated restricted zone would change the cost after the fact.
Two notes to carry with you. On a foreign destination, VAT is not announced at 10 %: it applies according to the rules governing the journey, and the receipt is worded that way. And we do not handle customs or immigration formalities. We drive; we do not represent anyone at a border.