Chennai Airport to Vellore Taxi

Chennai Airport to Vellore Taxi — 128 km for CMC Patients, VIT Students and Their Families

Vellore is 128 km from Chennai airport, around 2 to 3 hours by road, and the people booking this transfer are a particular crowd. Many are patients and their families flying in for treatment at CMC — from across India, the north-east especially, and from neighbouring countries. Many others are VIT students arriving for a new term, or parents coming for admission. For both groups the flight is only half the journey, and the drive out of the airport needs to go smoothly.

For patients: plan the whole chain, not just the car

If the person travelling is unwell, arrange airline wheelchair assistance directly with your airline when you book the ticket; the airline’s staff bring the passenger through to the arrivals pickup point, where our driver is waiting. Choose the car with the patient in mind. An SUV or Innova has a higher seat that is easier to get into than a low sedan, and the extra room lets someone stretch a leg or lie back a little. Bring a cushion and any medicines in a cabin bag that travels inside the car, not in the boot.

Please be honest with yourself about one thing: a taxi is not an ambulance. Our drivers are careful and patient, but they are not medical staff. A patient who needs oxygen, monitoring or a stretcher should travel by ambulance.

The pickup, step by step

Share the flight number and we follow its arrival. Before you land you will have the driver’s name, his photo and the number of the car. When the flight is down he calls or messages on WhatsApp and stands at the arrivals pickup point with a name board. If the flight is delayed, the pickup moves with it, and a delay that was not your doing costs you nothing extra. Airport entry and parking for the car, and the highway tolls, are paid at actuals.

The road west from Meenambakkam

Chennai airport is on GST Road at Meenambakkam, on the south side of the city, and Vellore is due west. The car therefore heads west through the suburbs — either out towards Kundrathur and on to Sriperumbudur, or along the bypass to Poonamallee — and joins the Bangalore highway. From there it is a steady run west past Sriperumbudur, with Kanchipuram a short way off to the south, and on through the Ranipet and Walajapet side into Vellore. The first half hour, getting clear of the suburbs, is where traffic can bite in the morning and evening; the highway itself is wide and easy.

Landing late with an appointment in the morning

Evening and overnight flights are common, and a landing at 11 PM puts you in Vellore well after midnight. That is fine if somewhere is expecting you. Families coming to CMC usually stay in the lodges, guest houses and rented rooms near the hospital; book that place before you fly, and tell them you will arrive in the middle of the night. Turning up at 2 AM hoping to find a room is the hard way to start a hospital visit.

If the appointment or registration is early the next morning, a night transfer is often the right choice: you sleep a few hours in Vellore instead of in Chennai, and you are already there when the day starts. The night allowance for driving between 10 PM and 6 AM is paid at actuals.

Tell us which CMC campus or which VIT gate

CMC runs more than one campus in and around Vellore, and the right one depends on the department in your appointment letter. Read the letter before you land and give the driver the campus name. For VIT, give the hostel block or the gate your admission email names. For a lodge, a WhatsApp map pin saves the driver ten minutes of asking around at night.

Students and their trunks

At the start of an academic year the airport is full of students with everything they own: two big suitcases, a backpack, sometimes a bucket and a mattress roll. Plan the car around that. A sedan takes two large suitcases plus cabin bags, an SUV three, and an Innova four. Two or three friends on the same flight can share an SUV and split the trip between them; tell us everyone’s luggage so we send a car with room for all of it. Parents dropping a student for the first time often book a round trip so the same car brings them back to the airport after the hostel is sorted.