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.
When you’re wondering whether these zones 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, included distance, rate, and remote fee — against the property’s distance. 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 you can set the order’s travel fee by hand when a job needs a custom total.
How the fee reaches the client
Once the property address is known during booking, Spatiko measures the distance from the photographer’s home base and works out that trip’s travel fee — distance beyond the included radius at the per-distance rate, plus the flat remote fee if it applies. 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 — no surprise line item after the fact.
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), so you can see exactly what a client at each of those distances would pay.
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. 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
- Calendar & availability — how travel time joins your hours, buffers, and daylight to decide a slot.
- Setting your availability — the working hours and buffers that travel time is reserved around.
- 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.
- Sales tax — how tax applies to the travel line along with the rest of the order.
- 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 — Spatiko measures the distance from that photographer's home base to the property, charges their per-distance rate beyond their included radius, and adds their flat remote fee past the remote threshold. 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?
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.