Better to have a practical or catchy business name

GO catchy first! That's how most BRANDS were build. Good luck!

I help small business owners with this question a lot.

Usually I ask them:
"What do you want to be?"

Do you want to be a brand or a service?

If you want to be a car valet service, then a practical name is just fine. Then you can focus on seo and adwords to attract people searching for that service.

If you want to be a brand (which may allow your business to expand into other services), then let's choose a name which is easily remembered and distinquishable from other local businesses. Then we can focus on brand promotion, social media promotion, online/offline advertising strategies which get your name in front of people as much as possible.

Most people confuse branding and messaging. True branding is best utilized by big companies with big budgets. For most small service local business, people don't care about your brand, they just care about your service. So going with a practical service-provider name approach is a simple way to get customers who are just looking for that service. I call this messaging. Craft your message so people know who you are and what you do. Basically answer the question 'why should they care?' If I'm in London, and I need a car valet service, then that's what you do, so I care to look at you, to see more specifics and how much you charge.

I'd go with the practical name. As the previous poster indicated, catchy names can be expensive to promote and gain any kind of memorable traction with potential customers. A lot of tech start-ups use them, often with foreign country extensions like .io.

Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but EMDs (exact match domains) are just much easier to draw meaningful attention. The shorter the domain the better. The easier to pronounce the better. A .com extension is best, not just in my estimation, but in the minds of most successful domain investors.

Speaking of domain name investors, I can't help but look at your decision from the perspective of its sale potential if and when you decide to drop the name and/or website.

For instance, homevalet(dot)com sold this month for $1200 (Source: NameBio). It hasn't been developed yet, but somebody placed a lot of value on it and I suspect it's because of its keyword focus.

Not saying your name will sell for as much or if it will sell in the aftermarket (like Godaddy Auctions or Flippa) at some point. It's just another factor consider when making your decision.

Happy New Year and hope your business brings success in 2017.