Booking around the North Idaho prom calendar
Prom season in Kootenai County concentrates into a handful of spring Saturdays, and the high schools do not coordinate their dates with each other. Coeur d'Alene High School, Lake City, Post Falls, Lakeland, and the Sandpoint schools can land on the same weekend or on consecutive ones, which means the regional supply of formal transportation is spent in a few weeks every year.
Because we run one limousine, a prom Saturday is one booking. Groups that wait until the dance is three weeks out are usually calling after every vehicle in the area is committed. If you know your date in February, book in February.
Homecoming in the fall is less compressed but follows the same pattern, and the winter formals in January and February bring the added question of road conditions, which is worth a conversation rather than an assumption.
What we ask parents to settle before the night
Three details do most of the work: the exact pickup address and time, the full itinerary including the dinner stop, and one parent contact number that will be answered all evening. If the group is splitting up after the dance, we need to know that at booking rather than at 11pm.
We ask that a parent — not a student — makes the booking and confirms the itinerary. That is not a formality. It means there is an adult who has agreed to the route, the stops, and the end time, and it means the person we call if plans change is the person who can actually make a decision.
We also confirm the return plan explicitly. Whether that is one drop-off, a sequence of home drop-offs, or a single address where parents are collecting everyone, it gets written into the booking. Nobody should be sorting that out in a parking lot at midnight.
The rules, stated plainly
No alcohol and no drugs in the vehicle, without exception, regardless of who booked it or what was agreed elsewhere. This is a licensed passenger vehicle carrying minors and that line does not move. If it is crossed, the trip ends and parents are called.
Passengers stay seated while the vehicle is moving, and the passenger count agreed at booking is the passenger count for the night. Adding two more people at the pickup is not something we can accommodate on the spot — the vehicle has a fixed capacity and the quote is built on it.
None of this is meant to make the night feel supervised. In practice it is invisible: the group gets a clean vehicle, a professional chauffeur who is not their friend's older brother, and a set of parents who are not awake at 1am wondering where the car is.