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).
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.
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 zones never contradict each other.
How the fee reaches the client
Once the property address is known during booking, Spatiko measures the distance from your home base and works out the travel fee — distance beyond your included radius at your per-distance rate, plus the flat remote fee if it applies. That 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 — no surprise line item after the fact.
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), so you can see exactly what a client at each of those distances would pay. You can also set or override the travel fee on an individual order when a job needs a custom number.
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. 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
The travel settings are presented in miles. Your property-size pricing units (square feet or square meters) are set separately in your account settings and don’t change the travel fields.
On a team
Each photographer has their own home base, service area, and rates. During booking, Spatiko measures from whichever photographer would take the job, so the travel fee reflects who’s actually driving to the property.
Frequently asked questions
How does Spatiko calculate travel fees?
Once the property address is entered at booking, Spatiko measures the distance from your home base, charges your per-distance rate for distance beyond your included radius, and adds a one-time flat remote fee if the property is past your remote threshold. The fee is added to the order as its own line item.
How do I limit how far I'll travel for a shoot?
Set a maximum travel distance in your Travel settings — beyond it a property is out of your coverage, and the client is steered to a quote request instead of a booking.
Do clients see the travel fee before they book?
The travel fee is surfaced as soon as the property address checks out, before the client has picked a single service, so the agent sees it before committing — 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.