How much travel buffer to leave between appointments

How to work out your travel buffer

Start the clock when one service genuinely finishes and stop it when you are ready to begin at the next address. Count cleaning, notes that must be finished before leaving, equipment pack-down, the drive, parking, getting into the building and essential setup. If a task stops you travelling or starting, it belongs in the buffer whether or not it appears on a map. Driving time alone nearly always understates the gap you need.

Add those parts together, then add a margin for ordinary uncertainty. A business that packs in ten minutes, drives for twenty, parks in five and sets up in ten needs 45 minutes before any margin. A number copied from another business is unreliable because equipment, geography and arrival expectations differ.

Keep service time and travel time separate. If the hands-on service routinely overruns, correct its duration instead of inflating the buffer. If parking causes the delay, add an access allowance for that area. Clear categories make later review useful because you know which rule needs to change.

• Pack-down and essential post-service work
• Expected door-to-door journey
• Parking, walking and building access
• Setup before the advertised start
• A margin for ordinary uncertainty

How do you measure a reliable baseline?

Record at least a week of real journeys across the areas and times you normally serve. Note planned service end, actual departure, arrival and ready-to-start time. Include normal slow journeys and ordinary setup, but label severe disruptions separately so one bad incident does not dictate every future appointment. The goal is a repeatable baseline, not a promise that the fastest trip you have recorded will happen every day.

Group comparable journeys: nearby, cross-area, peak-time and difficult-access. A city-centre visit with a parking search should not share a baseline with two neighbouring suburban customers merely because mapped drive times look similar. Start conservatively enough to keep commitments, refine as evidence builds, and revisit the numbers seasonally or when roadworks, coverage or working hours change.

Should you use an average or a range?

An average can hide important variation. If half your journeys between customers take twenty minutes and half take fifty, a thirty-five-minute buffer is too short for the long group and wastes time for the short group. A range, or a rule that changes with location, keeps that difference visible instead of pretending every journey is typical.

For a fixed buffer, choose a value that safely covers normal journeys inside a deliberately compact area, and handle outer locations on selected days or manually. For varied geography, let the drive vary by postcode or road conditions and add the non-driving time consistently.

When should you use a fixed travel buffer?

Use a fixed buffer when the service area is compact and most complete journeys fall inside a narrow range. It is easy for you and your customers to understand, and it keeps working if a mapping service is unavailable. Choose the number from normal completed journeys rather than a single ideal route. On CalMov Lite, this is the travel gap you set.

The trade-off is imprecision. If the buffer protects the longest common drive, it may create unnecessary gaps between nearby customers. If it reflects the average, it may be too short for edge postcodes. Reduce that tension by tightening the coverage area or assigning distant locations to particular days.

• See what a fixed gap costs over a working year

When should travel time vary by location?

Let travel time vary when regular pairs of customers create very different journeys. A five-minute local drive and a thirty-five-minute cross-area drive should not both inherit a forty-five-minute blanket gap unless simplicity is worth the lost nearby time to your business. A journey check based on each address can tell a nearby booking from a cross-area one.

Time of day and access can matter as much as distance. School traffic, bridges, city parking or building entry can make one route unpredictable. Road and expected-traffic checks add detail when the route and time of day affect whether a slot is practical, but they do not include every incident or on-site task.

Variable journey times still need the non-driving time added. A calculated twenty-two-minute drive does not include ten minutes packing equipment unless your settings add it elsewhere. In CalMov, Lite applies the travel gap you set, Pro checks roads and expected traffic for the planned time, and the Extra travel time (min) setting adds a fixed allowance to each journey for parking or delays. Decide what the journey check covers, what your settings add and what fallback applies when no journey time can be returned.

Why do you calculate travel in both directions?

When a new appointment sits between existing work, calculate the journey from the previous customer to the proposed one and from the proposed customer to the next. The new service and both journeys must fit inside the available window. Protecting only the first journey can make the new arrival punctual while pushing the next confirmed visit late.

The first and last visits of the day need a rule of their own. At the start, decide whether the journey from your base should count. At the end, decide whether the journey home needs protecting. Write these rules down so the same logic applies every time a customer requests a slot.

What does a worked travel-buffer calculation show?

A service finishes at 14:00. Packing takes ten minutes, the expected drive is twenty, parking takes five and setup takes ten. The complete buffer is 45 minutes, so the next appointment cannot start before 14:45. If completed days show this route varies by up to ten minutes in ordinary conditions, a ten-minute margin makes 14:55 the dependable start.

Now suppose the next customer is only a five-minute drive away. The same packing, parking and setup give a thirty-minute buffer, or 14:35 with a five-minute margin. A fixed 55-minute gap would be safe but would block twenty minutes here. Letting travel time vary could offer the earlier time to the nearby customer while keeping 14:55 for the longer journey, provided the other allowances stay the same.

How do you monitor and adjust the allowance?

Compare planned and actual ready-to-start times. Record whether differences came from service duration, departure tasks, route, parking or customer access. Review a pattern, not one bad day. Change the smallest relevant rule and observe it for another representative period before tightening further.

Track both lateness and excessive waiting. A buffer that prevents every possible delay may make too few slots available, while an average-only buffer may fail regularly. Aim for a dependable operating range with a clear plan for severe disruption, and tell affected customers promptly when reality falls outside the plan. Note seasonal roadworks, school terms and recurring local events so a temporary quiet period does not become the permanent baseline.

• Review repeated causes rather than isolated incidents.
• Update service time when the work itself overruns.
• Update parking allowance when access causes the delay.
• Recheck edge postcodes and peak travel periods.
• Keep the following confirmed appointment protected.

What is a seven-day buffer calibration plan?

For seven working days, record the time a service really ends, when you leave, when you arrive and when you are ready to begin. Keep pack-down, mapped journey, parking, access and setup in separate columns. The purpose is to find the complete time between visits and the part that varies, not to prove the original buffer right or wrong.

At the end of the week, group similar postcode pairs and compare the planned buffer with the normal ready-to-start time. Correct service duration before travel, then set a conservative fixed allowance or choose a location-based method. Recheck the longest regular route before making earlier times public.

• Record one row for every completed journey between customers.
• Separate service overrun from journey and access time.
• Group journeys that share similar geography and conditions.
• Choose a typical value plus an ordinary uncertainty margin.
• Test both sides of an in-between booking before launch.