Understanding Travel Time Calculations
How AwardLettr calculates drive times and optimizes your route.
The reason a "free" time slot on your calendar isn't actually free is the drive. A 2 PM inspection across town from your 12:30 looks fine in a calendar grid, but the 45-minute crawl through school traffic between them is invisible until you're sitting in it. Most scheduling tools treat your day as a stack of empty boxes and let people book whichever box they like, which is how you end up averaging 90 minutes of windshield time per inspection without realizing it.
AwardLettr puts the drive into the math. Each potential slot is checked against where you're actually coming from (your home for the first stop, your last appointment for the rest), and slots that would require more drive than your max get hidden from the booking page. Same-day requests use real-time traffic so you don't get caught by a wreck on I-35; future dates use historical averages plus a small buffer so the estimate holds up. This is the feature that quietly pays for itself, especially if you cover a wide territory or stack multiple inspections in a day.
AwardLettr uses Google Routes API to calculate accurate travel times between your appointments, considering real-time and historical traffic data.
How It Works
| Scenario | Traffic Mode | Buffer |
|---|---|---|
| Same-day booking | TRAFFIC_AWARE (real-time) | None |
| Future date booking | TRAFFIC_UNAWARE (historical) | 15% buffer (5-20 min) |
Travel Time Rules
- First appointment: Calculated from your home address
- Subsequent appointments: From previous appointment location
- Slots are blocked if travel exceeds your max_drive_time setting
- Rush hour adds a penalty but doesn't completely block slots
Set Your Home Address