Drive times between jobs, worked out for the time of day

Why a fixed gap between jobs is not enough

Most booking leaves the same few minutes between every pair of jobs, whatever the distance and whatever the hour. That works until two bookings land on opposite sides of town, or a job finishes at ten to five on a Friday and the next one is across the city at half past. The diary says it fits. The road says otherwise, and the customer at the second address is the one who waits.

A receptionist who knows your patch would not book that. This is the assistant doing the same thinking, on every call, without being asked.

What it does when it books

• It looks at the job before and the job after. For the time a caller wants, it takes the van's previous job that day and its next one, and works out the drive from the first address to the new one, leaving when that job ends, and from the new one to the next, leaving when the new job ends.
• It uses the hour the van is on the road. The estimate comes from how long that drive usually takes at that time on that day of the week, so a crossing of town at five on a Friday gets more room than the same trip at ten on a Tuesday morning.
• It only ever adds room. If the prediction is shorter than our own distance estimate, or than the buffer you set, the longer one wins. A prediction never squeezes two jobs closer together than you would have had them.
• What it offers, it can book. The same check that decides which times the caller hears is applied again when they choose one, so a caller is not offered half past two and then told half past two is gone. The time is held for them at once; by default you confirm it before they are told it is final.
• With more than one van, it books whichever van is free and can get there, and among those it prefers one already working nearby that day.

It is the same on every plan. On Essential it protects your one van's day; on Growth and Pro it also helps decide which van takes the job.

What it uses, and what it does not

It uses two things: the addresses of the jobs, and the time of day. That is all. It does not track your vans, your phone or anybody's location, and there is no app to install. Nothing it learns about a route is kept: the answer is used for the booking in hand and then thrown away.

To work out a drive, the address of a job is sent to a mapping service, with no name, no number and nothing about what the job is. That service, and where it processes requests, is listed by kind on our privacy page.

When it cannot tell

Sometimes it cannot work out a drive: an address it cannot find, a rural road the map does not know well, or the mapping service not answering. Then it falls back to an estimate from the distance between the two postal areas, and failing that to the buffer you set yourself. A booking is never refused because a map was unavailable. The worst case is the way booking worked before.

When it cannot confirm an address as a house it can find, it reads the address back to the caller before booking, and asks about the house number and the street. If the caller corrects it, it books at the corrected address. Your booking records how precisely the address was found, and your portal tells you when one is worth checking before the van goes.

What it is not

It is not live traffic. It uses how long a drive usually takes at that hour, not what is happening on the road right now. A crash on the highway this afternoon is not in it.

It is not a route planner. It does not reorder the jobs already in your diary or plan the whole day's run. It decides whether one new job fits between the ones you have.

It does not overrule you. When you add a booking yourself in the portal, it does not second-guess the drive: you have looked at the map, and it has not. And whether a job is inside your service area is still decided by the areas and distance you set in your profile, not by drive time.