No Riviera station is served from its front door
That is what makes this service particular, and it surprises people every time. At most coastal stations, the car cannot stop where the traveller comes out. At Nice-Ville the forecourt has been fully pedestrian since the Thiers interchange was rebuilt, and drop-off happens on a dedicated 130-space lane on the avenue Thiers side. A car that tries to reach the entrance circles, and the traveller waits.
At Cannes, access is from the back: the station short-stop car park opens onto boulevard de la Première Division Française Libre, runs twenty-four hours a day, and its covered section is capped at 1.90 metres. A van stays in the open air. In Menton, no underground car park exceeds 2.00 metres and the one at the station stops at 1.90 metres.
So the meeting point is never simply “outside the station”. It is named at booking, with the chauffeur’s number, and it takes the size of the booked vehicle into account.
What train tracking does, and what it cannot do
Tracking the train number does one thing: it shifts the pickup without you having to call from a platform. The reference time becomes the real arrival, and the 30 minutes of included waiting run from then.
What it does not do is rescue a cancelled train. A cancellation is not a delay, it is a different journey. One call is enough to reposition the booking, and a journey that does not happen is not charged.
The days the road absorbs the railway
These are the tightest days of the year for a chauffeur, and they are known in advance. The current coastal timetable announces major engineering work on Saturday 28 March, Saturday 13 June and Saturday 19 September, plus Monday 9 to Thursday 12 November. The Cannes to Grasse branch closes from 14 to 20 September, then on 5 and 6 December.
On those dates the switch to the road is automatic and demand doubles. Booking the night before is not enough.
Station to airport connections
This is the most requested run in the category, and the easiest to compare. On weekdays a train runs every 15 minutes between 5.50 am and 10 pm on the Cannes to Menton line, then every 30 minutes until 11.30 pm, with an extended weekend service until 2 am on Sunday morning. Nice Saint-Augustin station is linked to Terminal 1 by a seven-minute pedestrian walkway.
In other words the train works, and we say so. A chauffeur service earns its place in three cases only: luggage, a time outside the service window, and a final address that is not a station. Outside those three, the comparison does not favour us.
When the train is still the better answer
One traveller with a cabin bag, between Nice-Ville and Monaco-Monte-Carlo: the rail journey takes about 25 minutes, departures run every fifteen minutes through the day, and no car beats that at peak hour. Saying so costs one booking and is worth more than a disappointed passenger.
One caveat for Monaco, though. Access to the Rock is restricted by municipal order to vehicles registered in the Principality or in the Alpes-Maritimes. A traveller arriving at Monaco-Monte-Carlo with luggage and staying in Monaco-Ville cannot be driven up by just any car: the restriction is administrative, not a question of size.