Travel-time scheduling means the drive between jobs is part of availability. A time is only offered if a technician can get there from wherever they'll be right before it. It sounds obvious. It's also not how most scheduling software works.
Most systems treat availability as empty space on a calendar. Travel gets handled later: by a dispatcher eyeballing the board, by padding every job with extra minutes, or by a route optimizer that reorders the day after it's already booked. Each of those is a patch on the same missing step.
CrewLink builds that step in. It builds live travel time into availability, computed from where the truck will actually be, so the only slots offered are ones a crew can physically reach.
The three ways companies handle travel today
1. Ignore it and pad. Give every job a buffer and give customers a wide window. This works until it doesn't. The padding is real time on a real truck, paid for and never used, and the window gets wider every time someone is late. Here's why arrival windows get so long.
2. Fix it at dispatch. Book whatever the customer asks for, then have a dispatcher rearrange the board each morning. That puts the most expensive work on the person with the least room to make it, after the promises are already made.
3. Fix it with routing. Hand the booked day to a route optimizer. Routing finds the best order for stops you've already committed to. It can't un-promise the 11:00 on the far side of town. See route optimization solves the wrong half of the problem.
Travel-time scheduling fixes it at the source. The question "can the truck get there?" is answered before the customer hears a time.
How travel-time scheduling works
Here's the logic in general terms. At booking time, for each candidate slot:
- Find where the technician will be just before it: the previous job's address, not the shop.
- Find when that job is expected to end.
- Compute the drive from there to the new job, using travel time for that time of day, not a straight-line distance or a single daily average.
- Offer the slot only if
previous end + drive ≤ slot start. - A complete check also looks forward: the new job's end plus the drive to the next booked job must still fit.
That last step matters, and it's a good question to ask any vendor. A new job that's reachable but makes the next job unreachable is still a bad booking.
A calendar would offer 1:00 because both checks pass on paper. Travel-time scheduling doesn't, because the second drive breaks the 3:00 promise.
Why time of day matters
A twelve-mile drive at 7 a.m. and the same twelve miles at 4:30 p.m. aren't the same job. Systems that store one distance or one average drive per pair of addresses get the morning wrong in one direction and the afternoon wrong in the other. Live travel time is how CrewLink avoids leaning on one stored average. This is a big part of why windshield time stays hidden in most reporting: the averages smooth it away.
What changes when travel is in availability
- Arrival windows can narrow honestly. Uncertainty about the drive is what forced them wide. See how to shrink your arrival window.
- Backtracking gets harder to book by accident. A slot on the far side of town has to be reachable from the job before it.
- Utilization numbers start telling the truth. Drive time is visible next to each job instead of hidden inside it, so booked utilization and real utilization stop being confused.
- Dispatchers handle exceptions, not arithmetic. See dispatch software.
The honest trade-off
Travel-time scheduling sometimes means offering a customer Tuesday morning instead of the Monday afternoon they asked for, because Monday afternoon is on the wrong side of town for every truck you have. That can feel like losing a booking. What it buys is a day that holds together, crews that arrive when you said, and capacity you can sell because you know it's real.
To see what travel costs you now, run the windshield time cost calculator.
What to take away
- Travel-time scheduling checks the drive from the previous job before a slot is offered, and a complete check covers the drive to the next job too.
- Padding, dispatch heroics and route optimization are all patches applied after the promise is made.
- Drive times depend on the time of day. Single averages get both ends of the day wrong.
- CrewLink builds live travel time into availability, so every slot offered is one a crew can reach.
Common questions
What is travel-time scheduling?
Travel-time scheduling, also called travel-feasible scheduling, only offers appointment times a technician can reach from the job before, based on the expected drive at that time of day.
How is it different from route optimization?
Route optimization reorders jobs that are already booked. Travel-time scheduling decides which times to offer in the first place, so the day is feasible before routing ever runs.
Does travel-time scheduling reduce the number of jobs I can book?
It reduces bookings that were never reachable. Those would have turned into late arrivals and reshuffles. The arithmetic usually favors it: less of the day goes to driving and idle gaps, so the same crew has room for more real work. Run your own numbers in the jobs-per-day calculator.
Where does CrewLink start the travel calculation from?
From where the truck will actually be: the previous job's location and expected end time, not from the shop.