Do not add a fee. Build the travel into the price, and where the outer suburbs genuinely cost more, sell them a different service at a different price. The zone itself is a list of suburbs you choose, because there is no radius to set and nothing measures the distance for you.
That is worth knowing before you design a pricing structure around it. Petboost does not calculate a travel fee and does not add travel time to a booking. A service area is a named list of suburbs, full stop. Anything clever you want distance to do, you are doing yourself.
A fee announces the problem and does not fix it
Think about what a travel fee actually does to a booking.
It arrives after the customer has decided. They picked a service, saw a price, and then a surcharge appeared because of where they live. Even at $8 it reads as a penalty, and the conversation that follows costs you more than the fee. Half the time you waive it, which means you have built a charge you do not collect and still had the argument.
A second service priced for the outer ring does the same work without the argument. A walk at $45 for the suburbs you drive anyway and $55 for the ones fifteen minutes past them is two prices on a page. Nobody is surcharged. They simply see what their walk costs.
Work out the two numbers from the round rather than from the map. If the inner suburbs give you four dogs in ninety minutes and the outer ones give you three in the same time because of the drive, the outer walk has to carry a third more to earn the same hour. That is your uplift, and it is usually larger than the number people guess.
The zone ends where the round stops working
Drawing the boundary is the harder half, and it has almost nothing to do with kilometres.
The honest test is whether a booking in that suburb can share a run with a booking you already have. One client eighteen minutes out is not a zone, it is a favour you drive twice a week. Three clients in the same street eighteen minutes out is a second round, and it should have been priced as one from the start.
So the boundary is a density question. Take the suburbs where you have two or more regulars, keep them. Take the ones where you have one, and decide whether you are trying to build that suburb or quietly retiring it. The ones you drive to once a month are the ones costing you the most per hour, and they never show up as a problem because each individual trip felt fine.
Then write the list down and hold it. The suburb accepted once because it was a quiet week becomes a Tuesday, and a Tuesday is very hard to give back.
Set the area and hold the drive
Put the suburbs and the drive time on the mobile service itself, because that is where Petboost reads both.
- Open Services, then Manage on the mobile service and Manage Service.
- On Booking Settings, switch on Mobile service.
- On Who Can Book, switch on Advanced options, then select Edit Areas under Geographic Restrictions.
- In Select Service Areas, add each suburb you will travel to, then select Stage Changes.
- On Duration & Timing, switch on Advanced options and set Padding Before or Padding After.
- Select Publish Changes, tick the box in Before You Publish, then select Publish Changes.
Booking and availability covers the mobile settings and what a service area is and is not.
Areas sit on the service rather than the business, which is the part that makes the two-price shape work. Your standard walk carries the inner suburbs. Your outer-ring walk, at its own price, carries the rest. A customer in a suburb only the second service covers is offered the second service and its price, and no fee ever has to be explained.
The other half is time, and it is a separate setting. Nothing adds the drive to a booking, so a nine o'clock that finishes at ten leaves the calendar free at ten even though you are twenty minutes away. Use Padding Before or Padding After on the Duration & Timing tab, under Advanced options, to hold that time. Without it the booking form will sell you a day you cannot physically drive.
Lesson 111, service areas and the suburbs you cover, walks the same settings through on the real screen.
If you would rather keep one price and bill the trip, the remaining option is adding the travel as a line on the invoice after the booking. It works. It is also a decision somebody has to remember to make on every single booking, which is a poor place to keep a pricing rule.
Before you act: pricing, travel charges and what you tell customers about them are commercial terms between you and your customer, and this is general information rather than legal advice. Check your own terms and your obligations under Australian consumer law before you introduce a second rate.