Custom Travel Zones: Price Travel by Area

Radius-based travel fees assume your market is a circle. Most aren’t. There’s the town you’ll shoot in for free, the hills that always cost a morning, and the lake communities you’ll serve but only at a price. Custom zones let you draw those areas on a map and price each one on its own. This guide covers setting them up. For the rest of travel, including home base, drive time, and how fees are billed per trip, see travel time & travel fees.

Radius rings or custom zones

Every photographer prices travel in one of two modes:

• Radius rings, the default. One ladder measured out from the home base: free up to an included distance, a rate for each mile (or kilometre) past it, and a single flat fee past a remote threshold.
• Custom zones. Up to five areas you draw on the map, each with its own price, plus a rule for everywhere else.

The Radius rings / Custom zones switch is on the Travel tab: Settings → My Availability → Travel for your own settings, or Settings → Team & Availability, then a teammate, then Travel. It only appears once Travel fees enabled is on and a home base address is set.

Pick Custom zones and the zone editor replaces the radius fields and the sample fee preview. Maximum travel distance stays, because it still matters for the Everywhere else rule. The switch takes effect when you save the page, and a badge reminds you that saving switches this member to zone pricing. Switching back to Radius rings with unsaved zone edits asks before discarding them. Your radius settings are kept either way, so you can switch back later.

Drawing a zone

Click Draw a zone, then click the map to drop points around the area. Drag a point to adjust it, and right-click a point to remove it. When the outline is right, click Finish zone (the button counts your points), or Cancel to throw it away. A zone needs at least 3 points and can have up to 100. Its outline can’t cross itself.

To reshape a zone you’ve already drawn, click its row in the list. Drag points to move them, click the outline to add a point, and right-click or double-click a point to delete it. Press Escape to deselect. For fiddly edges, Full screen opens the map in a larger Service area view with the zone list alongside.

Zones save with the rest of the Travel tab, so click Save changes when you’re done.

Generating zones automatically

Rather than drawing from scratch, click Auto-generate to open Generate zones:

• Distance rings draws even rings straight out from your home base, one per distance, up to five. It starts from the distances in your radius settings, so switching modes opens on your own numbers. Each ring lands as a coarse outline of 10 to 16 points, ready for you to drag inward around anywhere you don’t serve.
• Drive time follows real roads instead, so an area stretches along highways and stops where driving slows down. You can add up to four bands, none longer than an hour. Tick Use typical Tuesday 9am traffic to size the bands for a weekday-morning drive.

Generating replaces the zones you already have. Every generated fee starts at $0, so price each zone afterwards. A banner above the map offers Regenerate, and Undo to bring your previous zones back.

Pricing each zone

Under the map, Zones — checked top to bottom, first match wins lists your zones in order. Each row has a colour dot (click it to change the colour), the zone’s name, and a price:

• Free. No travel fee for properties inside it.
• Flat fee. One fixed amount for any property inside it.
• Per mi (or Per km, depending on your travel distance unit). An optional base amount, plus a rate for every mile past a free distance. The distance is the estimated drive from the home base, not from the zone’s edge. With a $2 rate and the first 10 miles free, a property 24 miles out costs $28.

Order matters. Zones can overlap, and a property is priced by the first zone in the list that contains it, including one right on its border. Put your most specific areas at the top, and use the arrows on each row to reorder.

Everywhere else

The last row, Everywhere else, prices any address outside all of your zones:

• Not covered. You aren’t offered for those addresses at all. Your maximum travel distance then only serves as a reference circle on the map.
• Flat fee or Per mi. Priced like a zone, and bookable out to your maximum travel distance. With no maximum set, it’s always bookable.

An address inside one of your zones is always covered, even past the maximum travel distance. Spatiko won’t save Custom zones with no zones and Everywhere else set to Not covered, because that would cover nowhere. Add a zone first.

Testing a point

Click Test a point, then click anywhere on the map. A card shows which zone the spot falls in (or Everywhere else, or Not covered), the travel fee there (or Free), and the estimated drive from the home base. It’s the quickest way to check a tricky boundary or an overlap before you save.

What clients see

Zones change what a property costs and who’s offered for it. The client sees the same booking flow:

• On the Property step, a coverage card appears only when every photographer who could take the job would charge a travel fee. It usually reads Limited coverage, with “Travel fee from” and the lowest of those fees. If any eligible photographer has the property in a free zone, no card appears. An address that no one covers gets the Request Custom Quote option instead.
• On the Team & Time step, each photographer shows their own travel fee, like ”+$35.00 travel fee”.
• In the summary and on the Review step, the chosen photographer’s fee appears as its own Travel fee line.

The fee is set per trip when the shoot is booked. Editing your zones later doesn’t change shoots that are already booked.

Good to know

• Zones belong to a person. Each team member has their own pricing mode, zones, and Everywhere else rule, and every trip is priced from the photographer assigned to it. On a team, one photographer can use zones while another stays on radius rings.
• Who can edit. Photographers can edit their own zones. Editing a teammate’s needs the Manage roles & permissions permission. See roles and permissions.
• Travel fees enabled is still the master switch. Turn it off and no travel fee is charged, and Spatiko stops reserving drive time around your shoots. A photographer saved in Custom zones is still only offered inside the coverage their zones and Everywhere else rule allow.
• Units follow your business. Distances use the travel distance unit set for your business, miles or kilometres. See currency, units & timezone.
• Assigning shoots. When you assign a session yourself, the photographer picker shows each person’s zone-based travel fee, and anyone who doesn’t cover the address is marked Out of coverage.

Go deeper

• Travel time & travel fees — home base, drive time between shoots, and per-trip fee billing.
• Assigning shoots to your team — how coverage decides who can take a session.
• Order forms — where clients see coverage and travel fees while booking.
• Reading your analytics dashboard — the Locations map shows where bookings actually come from, to check your zones against.