Travel Time & Travel Fees
Set your home base, service area, and travel fees in Spatiko so real estate shoots stay reachable and distance is charged automatically at booking.
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Travel is two different jobs in Spatiko, and it helps to keep them straight:
- Travel time keeps your schedule realistic — it reserves the drive between shoots so you’re never booked in two places you can’t get between.
- Travel fees charge the client for distance automatically, so you’re paid for the miles instead of quietly eating them.
Both live on your Travel settings (Settings → My Availability → Travel, or a teammate’s Travel tab under Settings → Team & Availability).
Your home base
Set your home base address — the point Spatiko measures travel from. It’s the anchor for both your service area and your fee, with a map preview of your coverage.
Set a home base or you won’t appear in public booking. Without one, Spatiko can’t judge distance, so it can’t offer you for online bookings and can only rough-guess travel. This is a required setup step.
Two ways to price travel
Once Travel fees enabled is on and a home base is set, a Radius rings / Custom zones switch lets each photographer choose how their trips are priced:
- Radius rings price one ladder measured out from the home base. The rest of this guide describes it.
- Custom zones let you draw up to five areas on a map and price each one on its own: free, a flat fee, or per mile. See custom travel zones.
Either way, fees are priced per trip and billed the same way, as described below.
Your service area
- Maximum travel distance — the farthest you’ll go. Beyond it, a property is out of your coverage and you aren’t offered for it (the client is steered to a quote request instead).
- Included distance — how far you’ll travel at no travel charge, baked into your prices.
- Additional rate — what you charge per unit of distance beyond the included amount.
- Remote threshold and remote fee — once a property is farther out than your threshold, Spatiko adds a one-time flat surcharge on top, for the trips that eat a whole morning.
Spatiko keeps these in a sensible order — included distance sits within your remote threshold, which sits within your maximum — so your rings never contradict each other. In Custom zones mode, only the maximum travel distance stays, and it only limits addresses outside all your zones. The other three fields make way for the zone editor.
When you’re wondering whether these distances still fit reality, the Locations map in your analytics shows where your bookings actually come from.
Every trip is priced from the photographer driving it
A travel fee belongs to a trip, not to the order as a whole. When a session is booked, Spatiko prices its travel from the assigned photographer’s own settings — their home base and their radius rates or zones — against the property. An order with several sessions carries one fee per session, and the order’s travel fee is simply the sum of its trips.
Say Jordan books photos and drone coverage for 218 Glenwood Avenue as one order: Anna shoots the photos on Tuesday and Sam flies the drone on Thursday. That’s two separate drives, so each session carries its own fee — $25 for Anna’s trip, $40 for Sam’s (his home base is farther out) — and the order’s travel fee is $65. If you reassign a session to a different photographer, that trip is repriced from the new photographer’s settings; the other sessions don’t move. The exception is an order the client has already paid something on — the billed fee stays as it was, and simply follows the new photographer for payout; adjust it by hand if it needs to change.
Two things follow from per-trip pricing:
- Changing your travel settings affects future bookings, not booked shoots. A session’s fee is set when the shoot is booked (and again if its photographer changes — as long as nothing has been collected on the order yet), so raising your rate on Monday never touches Tuesday’s confirmed job.
- You stay in control of the number. You can edit a session’s travel fee directly on the order — or reset it back to the photographer’s rate — and, while an order has no scheduled session, you can set one travel fee for the whole order instead.
How the fee reaches the client
Once the property address is known during booking, Spatiko estimates the drive from each photographer’s home base and works out what that trip would cost. On radius rings, that’s the distance beyond the included distance at the per-distance rate, plus the flat remote fee if it applies. On custom zones, it’s the price of the first zone the property falls in, or the Everywhere else rule if it’s outside all of them. The fee is added to the order as its own line, on top of the services subtotal and after any promo discount.
The agent sees it before they commit. When every photographer who could take the job would charge travel, the Property step shows a “Travel fee from” estimate with the lowest of those fees. The Team & Time step then shows each photographer’s own fee, and the summary carries the chosen one as its own line.
From there the travel fee is billed like any other line on the order: it’s part of the checkout and invoice total, and it’s taxed along with the rest of the order where your services are taxable — see sales tax.
To sanity-check your rates, your Travel settings show a sample travel fee preview for shoots at fixed reference distances (10, 20, 30, and 50 miles, or 15, 30, 50, and 80 km if your business uses kilometres), so you can see exactly what a client at each of those distances would pay. The preview is part of radius rings. In custom zones mode, use Test a point on the map instead.
Travel time keeps slots honest
Separately from the fee, when Spatiko decides whether a time slot fits, it estimates the drive between the property and your other shoots that day (and your home base) and reserves that time around the booking. With travel-aware scheduling on, other events on your Google calendars that have a location count too. That’s how back-to-back jobs across town stay feasible — a slot that looks open but couldn’t be reached in time simply isn’t offered.
Because travel time and travel fee use distance differently, they don’t always move together: a property can be inside your coverage for the fee, yet a slot still gets declined because the drive doesn’t fit that particular day. That’s the system protecting your schedule, not a bug.
A note on units
Travel distances follow your business’s Travel distance unit, miles or kilometres, set in Settings → General. It’s separate from the Property size unit your size-based pricing uses. Changing the travel unit doesn’t convert the numbers you’ve already entered, so review your distances and rates after switching. See currency, units & timezone.
On a team
Each photographer has their own home base, service area, pricing mode, and rates or zones. Every trip is priced from the photographer assigned to it, so the travel fee always reflects who’s actually driving to the property — even when one order sends two different people out on two different days.
Go deeper
- Custom travel zones — draw the areas you serve on a map and price each one on its own.
- Calendar & availability — how travel time joins your hours, buffers, and daylight to decide a slot.
- Managing shoots on your calendar — reassign a session and the photographer picker shows the travel fee for each candidate.
- Managing an order — set a specific travel-fee amount on a single job instead of the distance estimate.
- Setting up photographer payouts — how the travel fee you collect reaches the person who drove.
Frequently asked questions
How does Spatiko calculate travel fees?
Each trip is priced from the photographer driving it. On radius rings, Spatiko estimates the drive from that photographer's home base to the property, charges their per-distance rate beyond their included distance, and adds their flat remote fee past the remote threshold. On custom zones, the property is priced by the first of their zones that contains it, or by their Everywhere else rule. An order with several sessions adds up each trip's fee, and the total appears on the order as its own line.
If I change my travel rates, do existing bookings change?
No. A session's travel fee is set when the shoot is booked, and again if its photographer changes — editing your travel settings only affects future bookings, so an already-booked trip is never silently repriced. Once any payment has been collected on an order, even reassigning the photographer keeps the booked fee. You can always adjust an individual order's travel fee by hand.
Do clients see the travel fee before they book?
Yes. When every photographer who could take the job charges travel, the Property step shows a Travel fee from estimate as soon as the address checks out. Either way, each photographer's fee shows on the Team & Time step and as its own line in the summary before the client books, so there's no surprise line item after the fact.
Why was a time slot unavailable when the property is inside my service area?
Travel time and travel fees use distance differently — a property can be inside your coverage for the fee, yet a slot still gets declined because the drive between that property and your other shoots that day doesn't fit. That's the system protecting your schedule.