San Francisco Airport Limo Service — Black SUV & Sedan Car Service to SFO, OAK & SJC

The Bridges

The Golden Gate Bridge. Opened on May 27, 1937, the Golden Gate is the bridge the whole world pictures when it thinks of San Francisco. It runs about 1.7 miles (8,981 feet) across the strait, its two Art-Deco towers rise 746 feet above the water, and the roadway hangs roughly 220 feet above the bay. Its 4,200-foot main span was the longest of any suspension bridge in the world from 1937 until 1964. It carries six lanes of US-101/Highway 1, and that famous color is officially "International Orange," chosen by architect Irving Morrow so the bridge would glow in the fog. We cross it for Sausalito, Muir Woods, Marin, and wine country, and we know the Battery Spencer and Marin Headlands vista points where the photos happen.

The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. The workhorse of the bay opened on November 12, 1936 — six months before the Golden Gate — and carries Interstate 80 between San Francisco and the East Bay. It is a double-decker (five lanes each way, westbound up top, eastbound below) running about 4.5 miles across the water by way of Yerba Buena Island. After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake dropped a section of the old eastern span, a brand-new self-anchored suspension span opened in 2013 — at the time the widest bridge in the world. It is our route to OAK airport, Oakland, Berkeley, and the Tri-Valley, and at night the western span shimmers with the LED "Bay Lights."

The Seven Hills & the View from Twin Peaks

San Francisco is built on more than 40 hills, but the "original seven" usually named are Telegraph Hill, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Rincon Hill, Mount Sutro, Twin Peaks, and Mount Davidson — Mount Davidson, at 928 feet, the highest point in the city. The most famous overlook is Twin Peaks: the twin summits rise about 922 feet near the geographic center of San Francisco, and on a clear day the view gives you the entire city at once — downtown, the bay, both bridges, Alcatraz, and the Pacific in a single 360° sweep. It is one of our most-requested tour stops, and our chauffeurs time it for late afternoon, before the fog spills over the ridge.

Pier 39 — San Francisco's Most-Visited Attraction

Pier 39 is San Francisco's single most-visited attraction — it has topped the city's visitor list for nine years running and draws roughly 15 million people a year, a figure that puts it among the most-visited destinations in the entire country, frequently cited as second only to Disneyland. And it began with a pilot's daydream. Warren Simmons, who had flown the world as a Pan American Airways pilot, came home to San Francisco with a vision of a waterfront gathering place; in 1973 he spotted a run-down old cargo pier — number 39 — buried under junk, and knew he had found his spot.

Pier 39 opened on October 4, 1978, much of it built from timber salvaged from the demolished piers around it. Simmons even ringed the new marina with a floating breakwater made of old tires — it held against ordinary bay chop, but the big northern storm swells rolled right over it and battered the bayside buildings, so it was later replaced with a solid concrete breakwater. Today the two-level pier packs in more than 50 shops — everything from souvenirs to fine jewelry — and 14 full-service restaurants, several still run by the Simmons family (Fog Harbor Fish House, Pier Market, and the Wipeout Bar & Grill). There is a hand-painted two-story Venetian carousel at the far end, street performers, the Aquarium of the Bay, and clear views out to Alcatraz, Angel Island, and the Golden Gate. And then there are the sea lions: in 1989 a colony of California sea lions hauled out onto the marina's floating K-Dock and simply never left — today several hundred bark and sun themselves there, free to watch, year-round. We drop guests right at the Beach Street entrance and stage nearby for pickup, because parking at the wharf is a fight — a chauffeur waiting at the curb is the easy way to do Pier 39.

The Parks

Golden Gate Park. San Francisco's great green rectangle runs three miles from the Haight to Ocean Beach and covers 1,017 acres — about 20% larger than New York's Central Park. Inside it: the de Young Museum, the California Academy of Sciences (aquarium, planetarium, rainforest, and a living roof under one roof), the Japanese Tea Garden (the oldest public Japanese garden in the United States), the Conservatory of Flowers, Stow Lake, and a paddock of live bison that has grazed there since the 1890s. The Presidio. The wooded former Army post at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge is now a 1,500-acre national park, with Crissy Field's restored shoreline, the Walt Disney Family Museum, and the new Tunnel Tops park. Lands End. Out at the city's northwest tip, a rugged coastal trail runs past cypress groves and shipwreck coves to the Legion of Honor museum in Lincoln Park. We run all of them as part of a city tour.

The Coast: Cliff House, the Zoo, the Last Beach Stable & Olympic Golf

The Cliff House & Sutro Baths. Perched above the crashing surf at Lands End, the Cliff House was San Francisco's legendary cliff-top restaurant for more than a century; the building closed in 2020, but the dramatic site and the ruins of the 1896 Sutro Baths just below it remain a favorite stop. Ocean Beach & the San Francisco Zoo. Three miles of windswept sand line the city's Pacific edge, and at its southern end sits the San Francisco Zoo, opened in 1929 on about 100 acres beside the ocean — grizzlies, gorillas, big cats, and a children's zoo. The last beach stable. Just past the Zoo, near Fort Funston at the city's southwestern corner, Mar Vista Stables keeps a century-plus tradition alive as the last place by San Francisco where you can still ride a horse on the beach — long after the old Golden Gate Park stables closed in 2001, ending 130 years of horses in the park. Olympic golf & Lake Merced. This corner is serious golf country: The Olympic Club's Lakeside course, a private club above Lake Merced, has hosted five U.S. Opens, and the city-owned TPC Harding Park next door hosted the 2020 PGA Championship. Around Lake Merced itself runs a roughly 4.5-mile loop that runners and cyclists from neighboring Parkmerced — the big garden-apartment community by San Francisco State — circle every morning.

Playland-at-the-Beach. For decades a beloved amusement park called Playland-at-the-Beach sprawled along Ocean Beach right next to the Cliff House. Its wooden "Big Dipper" roller coaster, the Fun House, the Diving Bell, and the famous cackling mechanical "Laffing Sal" drew San Franciscans to the foggy shore until Playland closed on Labor Day, 1972 (condominiums stand on the site today). The Big Dipper coaster itself had been torn down back in the 1950s — but a piece of Playland lives on down the coast: one of its Laffing Sal figures was later acquired by the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, where she still laughs by the midway. (The Boardwalk's own Giant Dipper, often mixed up with Playland's coaster, is a separate 1924 National Historic Landmark that has never left Santa Cruz.) Today we run the same Ocean Beach shoreline for SFO transfers, Zoo trips, and coastal tours.

Universities & Schools

San Francisco is a college town wrapped inside a tech capital. UCSF (University of California, San Francisco) is one of the world's leading health-sciences universities — medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and dentistry only, with about 3,000 graduate and professional students and the top-ranked UCSF Medical Center at Parnassus and Mission Bay, where we run a dedicated medical-concierge car service. San Francisco State University (SFSU), the big public campus near Lake Merced, enrolls around 22,000 students. The University of San Francisco (USF), the Jesuit university on the hill by Golden Gate Park, enrolls about 9,000. UC Law San Francisco (founded 1878, formerly UC Hastings) is the city's law school, with roughly 1,100 students and a dozen concentration areas. Add the California College of the Arts, the Academy of Art University, Golden Gate University, and the City College of San Francisco, and tens of thousands of students fill the city. On the K–12 side, the San Francisco Unified School District's Lowell High School is one of the highest-ranked public high schools in California, alongside private schools like University High and Lick-Wilmerding.

The Companies Headquartered Here

For a city of just 47 square miles, San Francisco carries an outsized share of the global economy. Headquartered here are Salesforce (whose 1,070-foot tower is the city's tallest building), Uber, Airbnb, Visa, Wells Fargo, Levi Strauss & Co. (founded here in 1853), Gap, Williams-Sonoma, DoorDash, Pinterest, Reddit, Dropbox, Block (Square), Lyft, Dolby, Yelp, PG&E, and the AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic. We run standing corporate accounts and executive airport transfers for many of them — see our SF Bay Corporate HQ directory.

Getting Around: Muni, BART, Cable Cars & Self-Driving Cars

Muni. The San Francisco Municipal Railway runs the city's buses, the Metro light-rail subway, the vintage F-line streetcars along Market and the Embarcadero, and the world-famous cable cars — three lines (Powell-Hyde, Powell-Mason, and California Street) that are the last manually operated cable-car system on earth and a moving National Historic Landmark. BART. Bay Area Rapid Transit is the regional rail backbone, linking downtown San Francisco directly to SFO, the East Bay, and the Peninsula. Ferries & Caltrain. Ferries fan out from the Ferry Building to Sausalito, Tiburon, and Oakland, and Caltrain runs south down the Peninsula to Silicon Valley from its SoMa terminus. Self-driving cars. San Francisco is now the proving ground for driverless robotaxis — Waymo's autonomous cars operate commercially across the city, a genuinely remarkable sight. But for the airport run — with luggage, a flight to catch, and a fixed flat rate — nothing beats a professional chauffeur who meets you at the curb, handles the bags, tracks your flight, and knows exactly which terminal, ramp, and hotel door to use. That is the difference we have delivered since 1986.

Lombard Street — the "Crookedest Street"

Lombard Street's most famous block, switchbacking down Russian Hill between Hyde and Leavenworth, is known the world over as the "crookedest street." Its eight tight hairpin turns were added in 1922 — the idea of property owner Carl Henry — to tame a brutal 27% grade that early cars simply couldn't climb, easing it to a manageable 16%. Today it runs one-way downhill over red brick, lined with hydrangeas, and is one of the most photographed streets on earth. (Local trivia: Potrero Hill's Vermont Street is arguably even curvier.) We bring guests to the top on Hyde, right by the Powell-Hyde cable-car line, for the view and the ride down.

Coit Tower & Telegraph Hill

Crowning Telegraph Hill in Pioneer Park, the 210-foot Art-Deco Coit Tower was built in 1932–33 with a bequest from Lillie Hitchcock Coit, a colorful socialite who adored the city's volunteer firefighters (the tower's resemblance to a fire-hose nozzle is a fun myth its architects always denied). Inside are some of the finest 1934 WPA fresco murals in the country; up top, an open-air deck delivers a sweeping view over the bay, both bridges, and the hidden wooden stairways of Telegraph Hill, where a famous flock of wild parrots lives.

Alcatraz — "The Rock"

A mile and a quarter offshore sits Alcatraz — "The Rock" — the federal maximum-security penitentiary that held Al Capone and "Machine Gun" Kelly from 1934 to 1963 and was billed as inescapable (the 1962 escape that inspired the films remains officially unsolved). Today it is one of the National Park Service's most popular sites, reached by ferry from Pier 33 on the Embarcadero. We time hotel pickups to the ferry boarding so guests aren't left waiting on the waterfront.

The Painted Ladies & Alamo Square

The row of pastel Victorian and Edwardian houses along Steiner Street facing Alamo Square — the "Painted Ladies," or "Postcard Row," familiar from the opening of Full House — frames the downtown skyline behind it in what may be the city's second-most-photographed view after the bridge. San Francisco kept thousands of the ornate wooden homes that survived the 1906 fire, and our drivers know the quiet blocks in Alamo Square, Pacific Heights, and the Haight where the prettiest ones line up.

Chinatown — the Oldest in North America

San Francisco's Chinatown — established in 1848 — is the oldest in North America and one of the largest Chinese communities outside Asia. Enter through the Dragon Gate at Grant Avenue and Bush Street into a warren of temples, herbalists, dim-sum houses, and the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory (the fortune cookie was popularized right here in San Francisco). It is a short, traffic-thick hop from Union Square and the Financial District — exactly the kind of trip where a chauffeur who knows the one-way alleys earns his keep.

What San Francisco Tastes Like

This is a great food city with its own inventions. Sourdough bread is practically the civic loaf — Boudin Bakery has baked it from the same "mother dough" since 1849, making it the oldest continuously operating business in the city. The Mission burrito — big, foil-wrapped, rice-and-everything — was born in the taquerias of the Mission District in the 1960s. Down at Fisherman's Wharf it is Dungeness crab and cioppino (the city's own seafood stew); in North Beach it is Italian cooking and some of the country's first espresso houses; and the Irish coffee was made famous at the Buena Vista Cafe by the Hyde Street cable-car turntable. We run dinner reservations and food tours across all of it.

Karl the Fog & the Microclimates

San Francisco's summer fog is so much a part of the city that locals gave it a name — Karl — as it pours over Twin Peaks and the Sutro Tower on July afternoons. The climate is mild and Mediterranean, rarely freezing and rarely hot, but it splits into famous microclimates: it can be foggy and 58°F at Ocean Beach and sunny and 75°F in the Mission on the very same afternoon. (The line about "the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco" is forever — if dubiously — pinned on Mark Twain.) The practical takeaway for visitors: dress in layers, and let your chauffeur worry about the route while you enjoy the view.

Want to see it all without driving or parking? Book a private San Francisco city tour, or call +1-650-876-1777 — 24/7, since 1986.

Mission Dolores — Where the City Began

San Francisco began at Mission Dolores. Mission San Francisco de Asís was founded in 1776 — the same year as American independence — and its thick-walled adobe chapel, completed in 1791, is the oldest surviving building in San Francisco, having ridden out both the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes intact. The city took its nickname from the mission, and the little cemetery beside the chapel is one of the last within city limits. It anchors the Mission District, the sunny, mural-covered heart of the city's Latino culture.

The Castro, Harvey Milk & the Rainbow Flag

The Castro is the historic heart of San Francisco's LGBTQ community and a landmark of the worldwide gay-rights movement. It was here that Harvey Milk ran his camera shop and, in 1977, became one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States as a city supervisor (he was assassinated at City Hall in 1978, the story told in the Oscar-winning film Milk). And it was for San Francisco's 1978 Gay Freedom Day that artist Gilbert Baker sewed the very first rainbow flag — now the global symbol of Pride — first raised here in June 1978. The giant flag at Harvey Milk Plaza and the restored Castro Theatre still mark the spot.

Haight-Ashbury & the Summer of Love

A few blocks east of Golden Gate Park, the corner of Haight and Ashbury gave its name to the 1967 "Summer of Love," when tens of thousands of young people poured into San Francisco and the counterculture went global. The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and Jefferson Airplane all lived in the neighborhood's grand Victorians; today the Haight keeps its bohemian streak with record shops, vintage stores, and tie-dye. Our drivers run it as part of the city's 1960s history tour.

The Ferry Building

The grand 1898 terminal on the Embarcadero, with its 235-foot clock tower modeled on the Giralda bell tower in Seville, was once one of the busiest transit hubs in the world — before the bridges, nearly everyone arrived in San Francisco by ferry. It survived both the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes, and today its great nave is a celebrated gourmet marketplace and farmers' market, with ferries still running to Sausalito, Tiburon, and the East Bay from the slips behind it.

Ghirardelli Square

Domingo Ghirardelli founded his chocolate company in San Francisco in 1852 — one of only three American chocolate makers that predate the Civil War. The red-brick factory complex by the bay was reborn in 1964 as Ghirardelli Square, one of the country's first major adaptive-reuse retail centers, and the giant rooftop GHIRARDELLI sign and the hot-fudge sundaes at the Soda Fountain are still Fisherman's Wharf institutions.

Sutro Tower

The three-pronged red-and-white tower that floats above the fog on the city's central ridge is Sutro Tower — at 977 feet the tallest structure in San Francisco, completed on July 4, 1973 to bring clear television reception to a city full of hills. Locals either love it or call it an eyesore, but on a foggy morning, with only its top poking through Karl, it is pure San Francisco.

Treasure Island & the 1939 World's Fair

The flat island in the middle of the bay, beside the Bay Bridge, is Treasure Island — a 400-acre artificial island built on bay fill to host the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939–40, San Francisco's dazzling world's fair celebrating the brand-new Golden Gate and Bay bridges. After the fair it became a U.S. Navy base, and today it is being reborn as a bayfront neighborhood with some of the best skyline views in the region — a favorite photo stop on our city tours.

Mills Field — How SFO Began on a Cattle Ranch

The Bay Area's global gateway started as a cattle pasture. In the 1920s the bayfront land south of the city belonged to the estate of Darius Ogden Mills, a Gold Rush banker who founded the Bank of California and gave neighboring Millbrae its name — a Millbrae neighborhood is still called the Mills Estate today. On May 7, 1927, San Francisco dedicated a single dirt runway on 150 leased acres of that ranch and called it Mills Field Municipal Airport. It became San Francisco Airport in 1931, gained “International” after World War II, and today moves more than 54 million passengers a year on 50-plus airlines — the field Airport Commuter has served since 1986. More on SFO & our airport car service →

History, icons, food, and views — see it your way on a private San Francisco city tour, or call +1-650-876-1777. Chauffeured, flat-rate, and on your schedule since 1986.