Rate for travel time

Paul Rodgers

Paul Rodgers

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What is your rate for travel time? Do you estimate the amount before going on-site or do you charge for the actual amount you are on the road?
 
I bill my full rate door to door for any distance over 15 miles.
from the time I leave my door (or last stop) till i leave the customer door.

sometimes i'll waive it if they are a good customer or there's something i was working on remotely that I thought I could handle in that manner but then realized I needed to be on-site.

as with all things I make sure the customer knows what they are being charged for and why.
 
For jobs outside my usual service area, I estimate the additional charge and tell the customer up front. I don't charge for time I'd normally travel for free (my local service area). I only charge the additional time beyond my home area.

For example, if I'll be on the road an hour longer than usual (1/2 hour beyond my normal area) I let the customer know there will be an additional hour charged for travel. If traffic is heavier or lighter than usual, I don't adjust.
 
After looking at the posts above, I guess I'm still old style when it comes to charging 'road time'.

I charge by the mile outside of 25 miles of my shop. It's a $1.00USD per mile, or as I have it on my invoices:

$0.50 per mile to and from job site outside 25 mile radius.

Perhaps I need to look into changing that to something like the above where he charges a full hour of labor for being on the road 1/2 hour and further from his shop.

But I do charge a diagnostic / call out fee of $30.00 ($45.00 if I have to disassemble a laptop) so I've been happy so far with my 'road charges'.
 
It comes with the Bill....

I don't charge travel times, it's already added with the whole bill. :)
 
I charge $20/hr for all travel to location. It's fair for those who are close and far from me, so everyone pays accordingly and I dont punish everyone with large fees even if they are close. Ala carte so to say.

Works well, no one complains.
 
I have my county and the surrounding counties (30mins travel or less to get to other county) and outside of that it's $15/hr both ways. For good customers I do wave.
Travis
 
Within approx. 8 mile radius of shop, no travel charge. Flat rate of $20 for calls 9-15 miles from the shop. $25 for 16-20 miles away. 99% of our calls are under the 20 miles..thank goodness.
 
Our business is strictly on-site - we do not have a store-front. Therefore, EVERYTHING we do has travel involved. Over the years we've tried a number of ways to account for travel.
1. We tried billing for travel based on time, but traffic conditions often skewed the results. Plus, it wasn't always clear how to charge if the previous call was just a short distance, whereas if we were coming from our office it would be a longer trip.
2. We also tried billing for travel based on a rate-per-mile. But that had similar problems as #1. In addition, this method was more intimately tied to the cost of fuel (which, around here, changes on a daily basis!) and frequently had to be changed.

Also, we found that no matter how it was calculated, a highly variable travel charge tended to cause new customers to shop around for techs based strictly on location.

We now use a simple travel charge based on the distance from our office to the client (which we call a "trip charge", a common term around here also used by other businesses, e.g. plumbers):
$30 if in the city, $40 for outside the city and within 30 miles, and $50 for anything farther away. Each service call has the appropriate trip charge regardless of the previous call's location.

We make more money on some some travel than others, but it all works out in the end. And customers seem happy with it.
 
all this charging per mile, or a certain amount for distance is far too much hassle and farting about imho

I reckon that you either charge a fixed call-out fee or don't bother

I don't think you'd get away with charging travel time with any other business, or am I missing something?
 
I think it depends on your area. I have no need to charge for travel there are so many repair people around that it's not likely anyone over 20 miles will call me and as most of the travel to the surrounding villages are country roads you can get there quite quickly. On the other hand when I lived in London then 8 miles across it could be a nightmare :eek:
 
Martyn nailed it.

It's mostly rural area here. Bloomington/Normal is about 120k people but the surrounding area's are all little towns. There's about 14 businesses listed in the yellow pages under PC Repair. I'm not one of them. I don't know what their policies on this are. The one guy I'm friendly with does charge door to door like I do. The last company I worked for 15 years ago did the same. I guess it's expected in this area for certain services.

I have clients with satellite offices 30 to 60 miles away.
I handle most things remotely but If i have to go on-site to fix a printer or for anything else they pay for my time.

My time & knowledge are the only products I sell. If the customer's situation requires me to go out of town they can pay or find someone else.

it's not a hassle or nickel and dime to me. If the customers didn't like it they'd speak up or not call at all.
 
glricht said:
Our business is strictly on-site - we do not have a store-front. Therefore, EVERYTHING we do has travel involved.
Click to expand...

Same here. When I started my business I choose to do a per-solution type pricing, instead of an hourly fee. I did some research as to what others were charging in my area, and then determined what I wanted to average per hour. With this info I determined a price per service based off how long I expected to spend on average for each repair...
...I've realized though that I've under-priced myself by not accounting for travel time (and because I thought I was being "nice," but that's a different story). So I am going to increase my prices by about 1/2 hour worth of work across the board. So that the travel fee is built into the price. If the customer needs many things I can give them a discount on an individual basis.

This may not be right for everyone, but it seems to be the right direction for me. I also charge a small mileage fee for outside of a 15 mile radius, but these calls are rather rare.
 
At my company we charge $15 per 15 minutes travel to and from the location - so if it take us 6 minutes to get there then we know it takes 6 back so bill them $15 - if they are on the border of say 8 minutes we bill for just $15 but we are fairly strict on the timing as we record times for leaving the shop, arriving onsite, and leaving onsite on the clients paperwork. We also do not reduce the time if we are in the area from another service call because that will lead to issues when you have another call with them and charge a different amount for travel - we always charge as if we had come from the shop. The way I look at it is we are reimbursed .55 per mile driven and for the time you spend driving that is taking away your time from bench work so you should charge for travel.
 
I only work at customers own premises, so everything involves travel, but I only advertise (quite heavily) locally, so I very rarely get calls from people more than say 10-15 mins away, so it's never been a problem.
On the very few occasions where I've had people more that 30 mins travel away, I've explained the problem over the phone, and asked in advance if they'd be happy paying an extra half hour/hour (depending) for travel time. It's only been 3 times, but they've always been more than happy to pay.
 
Wow. You people are crazy for charging as little as you do. We have a flat rate $169 trip charge over 10 miles. If it's under 10 miles, it's $129. If they want to take away a tech from his workbench where he can be working on 4-6 computers at the same time, they're going to pay dearly for it. Honestly we don't even want to go on site for what we charge. It's always best to get the customer to come in. During busy times, we charge up to $369 for a trip charge for businesses. It's just not worth it to go on site unless it's a business that you know you're going to make $1,000+ on. For residential, going on site is a losing game. We just charge the $169 to help absorb the cost.
 
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