Thanks to all of you for the positive responses to this thread, and I’m pleased that you’ve found it informative. As there have been a couple of questions about costs and insurance, I’ll try to answer them while the details are all still fresh in my mind.
The standards collection package is for the purchaser of the vehicle only and includes the following if you’re picking up from Stuttgart (Sindelfingen):
- Club-class flight with Lufthansa or BA from Heathrow or Manchester to Stuttgart
- One night’s accommodation in the 4-star Marriott Hotel at Sindelfingen with breakfast and a €40 evening meal allowance
- A voucher giving free entrance to the Mercedes-Benz Museum at Unterturkheim
- Taxi transfers from the airport to the hotel and from the hotel to the Collection Centre
- A Factory Tour of the Sindelfingen plant
- 5 days fully-comprehensive motor insurance, valid for anyone with a full UK licence, and with zero excess
- A standard (i.e. fixed departure time) Shuttle crossing to get you back to the UK
All the above are included in the standard delivery charge when you buy the car, but most of us want to take someone with us to share the experience and for this you have to pay a supplement of £316 (if you share a hotel room) to cover the cost of the additional flight and meals. If you want separate rooms the supplement is higher, but I don’t remember by how much.
My wife has accumulated a large number of Air Miles as a result of business travel, so I asked the Personal Collection people if we could somehow take benefit from that. The answer was that we couldn’t mix-and-match our flights, but if we were to provide our own flights for the two of us then in return they would waive the supplement and provide us with a second night’s hotel accommodation on a bed and breakfast basis, i.e. we would only get a €40 meal allowance each for the first night’s stay. Quite a bargain I thought, especially as the two BA flights cost us less than £100 in total (even with Air Miles you still have to pay the taxes and fuel surcharge
). OK, so they were Coach and not Club-class but the flight is only 95 minutes.
As we were making a mini-break out of the trip we wanted to stay in Stuttgart itself rather than Sindelfingen as there would be more to do in the evenings. Also it was easier to use taxis or public transport from there to get to the Museum which we wanted to visit before picking up the car. MB Personal Collection have a number of recommended hotels in Stuttgart and we chose Le Meridien which I can happily recommend to anyone else as a comfortable hotel in a good location. We had to pay a small supplement of £100 for this hotel.
The Personal Collection team were very helpful throughout in terms of giving advice about timings and suchlike and will even book accommodation for you on the return journey should you require them to do so. In summary, all we had to provide was:
- Our own transport from home to Heathrow (our local taxi firm by chance picked us up in a LWB 320CDI S-Class, which was a nice start to the trip :bannana: )
- Transport from Stuttgart to the Museum and back (I recommend the S1 S-Bahn train from the main station)
- An evening meal on the second night in Stuttgart
- One night’s garage parking at Le Meridien
- Fuel, accommodation and meals for the return trip
As far as picking up an AMG model, I’m not sure whether you go to the AMG facility or one of the “normal” collection centres. Why not phone up the Personal Collection people at Milton-Keynes and ask? I’m sure they’ll give you the low-down.
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