A calendar shows when you are free. It does not know where you are, so it will happily sell a 4pm across town from your 3pm.
The coach absorbs the difference. You drive faster, you arrive flustered, you cut the warm-up, or you eat the gap yourself and lose the income. None of that is a scheduling accident. It is what happens when time is modelled and place is not.
This playbook turns travel into a rule the system enforces.
1. Inventory the places
List every place you coach. Be specific.
- Named clubs and facilities.
- Public courts and parks.
- Client homes or private courts, grouped by area rather than address.
- Any travel or pop-up dates in other towns.
For each, note the things that cost time but are not driving: parking, gate access, checking in, walking to the court, setting up equipment.
2. Measure the real drive
Not the optimistic drive. The one at the hour you actually coach.
For each pair of venues you might use on the same day, check the drive at your real peak times: after school, early evening, Saturday morning. Write down the slow number, not the average.
Then add the access time from step 1 to both ends.
Riverside Club to Northgate Park Drive at 4pm: 22 minutes Parking and walk at Northgate: 6 minutes Buffer: 30 minutes
Round up. You are protecting the lesson either side, not optimising a route.
3. Group venues into days
Some pairs should never share a day. Once you have the numbers, that becomes obvious rather than a judgement call you make while a client waits for an answer.
Sort each pair into one of three groups:
- Same block. Close enough to run back to back with a small buffer.
- Same day, different block. Workable with a real gap between them.
- Never together. The travel eats a lesson’s worth of income.
The third group is the valuable one. Most coaches have at least one pair they keep trying to make work.
4. Turn the numbers into rules
For each venue pair, you now have a buffer. Set it as a rule, not a habit.
- Minimum gap between sessions at different venues.
- First bookable time at each venue, accounting for how you get there.
- Last bookable time at each venue, accounting for getting home or to the next thing.
- Venue pairs that cannot appear on the same day at all.
The point is that the rule applies when a client is choosing, not when you are reviewing. A buffer you hold in your head is a buffer you will break under pressure from a good client.
5. Protect the block, not just the drive
Two more rules worth setting while you are here.
Minimum block size. If crossing town costs 30 minutes each way, a single lesson at that venue may not be worth the trip. Set a minimum: that venue opens for bookings only when there is already something else there, or only on defined days.
Travel days. If you coach in another town periodically, publish those as defined dates rather than leaving general availability open. It concentrates demand into the trip instead of scattering it.
6. Watch a real week
Publish the rules and run a normal week. Then ask one question about each transition: did you arrive with time to spare, or did you arrive rushed?
Anywhere you arrived rushed, the buffer is wrong. Increase it. The number that matters is the one that holds on a bad traffic day, because that is the day the client remembers.
7. Re-measure when the world changes
Traffic patterns move with seasons, school terms, and roadworks. When a venue starts feeling tight, re-measure that pair rather than absorbing it.
What good looks like
When this is set up properly, a client opening your booking page sees only sessions you can genuinely reach. There is no negotiation, no apologetic message about the drive, and no lesson that starts ten minutes late because the calendar did not know about the traffic on the way.
Elite Coach Booking treats place as part of availability rather than a note on the appointment, so drive-time buffers and venue rules are enforced before a client can book, not corrected afterwards.
Background reading: Drive time is part of the schedule