Travel Time: To Bill or Not?

Whether you work on the agency or the consulting side, or if you hire consultants, one issue that can vary from firm to firm is how to account for and bill travel time.

Most PR professionals I’ve talked with agree that you need to bill for the time if a specific client requires the travel and prevents the consultant from serving other people. 

However, what rate do you use? While the pandemic has greatly reduced travel time, it remains a thorny billing issue, and one worth addressing as more people will be heading out on the road again in the months ahead. I spoke with three veteran communicators for their thoughts.

Michael Grimaldi is a strategic initiatives coordinator for KC Water in Kansas City. Prior to that, he spent two decades working on the agency side.

“For a trip across town for a client meeting, we’d bill the driving time if we discussed the project en route,” he said. “If not, then we would bill the travel time one way only. If we had to travel a long distance or take a flight, we billed the travel time one way.

“Generally, if we conducted client business along the way or on the return trip, we’d bill it,” he added. “This may have involved discussing the client needs and plans, and planning for the meeting itself.”

He said that clients tended to be comfortable with these practices since they expect consultants to deliver value. 

“At the end of the day, good clients expect to pay a fair and reasonable price for value, regardless of where the consultant was when the work was done, in the office or on the road,” Grimaldi said.

A half-rate for travel 

Helen Patterson, APR, president of King Knight Communications in western North Carolina, worked for other firms before starting her own. In her prior experience, it was common to bill “full time” for travel.  One former employer followed an eight-hour-day billing policy.

“Even if we spent 12-15 hours working that day, including a cross-country airline trip, only eight hours were billed to the client,” she said.

Today, Patterson says her policy is to bill distant travel at half of the actual time. In other words, a four-hour drive would be invoiced to the client as two hours. She does not bill clients for travel within her geographic market.

She says her clients haven’t objected to her travel time policies, though she admits that these days, she doesn’t travel for clients quite as often, and didn’t even during the pre-pandemic period.

“Most of my recent work has been accomplished through phone email, and video conference calls — with an occasional trip to a conference that clients have attended,” she said.  

Blake Lewis, APR, Fellow PRSA, founder of Three Box Strategic Communications in Dallas, says that when traveling from one point to another for a client, he generally has billed 50 percent of the billable rate.

“A half-rate for travel strikes a balance between loss of productivity for other client work, while recognizing that clients generally view travel as a lower-value, yet necessary expense,” he said. “If material client work is done during the travel, that activity has been invoiced at the full rate.” 

There are times when Lewis said it was appropriate to detail special travel considerations, such as not charging for travel from offices to the client office. These decisions have been made in consultation with the client.

“We once worked an assignment where I traveled from Dallas to their headquarters in another state part of every week, consulting on restructuring the client’s corporate communications function,” Lewis said. “Aside from airfare reimbursement, my time wasn’t billed because we knew going into the project travel was all a part of it. I used that time for administrative tasks or for just enjoying the break.”

In the end, Blake said, “It can be challenging to find the boundaries. Reviewing what was planned, proposed and agreed to by the client helps make the lines more obvious.”