Reduce Travel Time Between Viewings

Your catchment area stretches over 70 kilometres, and your properties are scattered across it. Some days you drive north in the morning, back to the city at noon and out again in the afternoon – just because the appointments were booked in that order. Every unnecessary trip is lost time and avoidable effort.

How timum solves this

With gap-free appointment booking, a prospect can only choose times that directly adjoin an appointment that has already been booked – before or after it. Scattered appointments simply never arise. Combined with buffer times for travel, timum clusters your viewings automatically, without you having to reschedule manually.

• Gap-free booking prevents isolated single appointments – new bookings connect to existing ones.
• Buffer times between appointments factor in travel and preparation.
• Your personal calendar stays in sync so that private blockers are respected.

What you need to set up

Two things, both one-off:

1. Buffer time per appointment type. A viewing gets lead time and follow-up time – timum keeps the travel time free automatically instead of pushing it into your calendar. You define this per appointment type, not per appointment.
2. Consultation hours instead of individual slots. You store rules – "Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m." – from which timum generates the bookable times. You keep entering holidays and absences where you are used to doing so: in Outlook, Google or Apple Calendar. timum automatically removes these times from what is offered (consultation-hours rules, guide).

The reverse works too: you can enter blockers and private appointments directly in timum, and instead of working with rules, you create individual bookable appointments or availabilities by hand. The rule is the more convenient route, not the only one.

Whoever books the first appointment of the day chooses freely within your availability – the clustering kicks in from the second booking. That is intentional: your day shouldn't fall apart just because the first prospect had no anchor.

Does this also work across several properties?

Not by itself – but the limit is easy to remember: gap-free booking is evaluated per property. The chain forms within one property, not automatically across your whole area.

Two other mechanisms work across your properties:

• In every plan: assign areas to days. A consultation-hours rule applies to the properties you assign to it – and one rule can cover several properties. So: one rule "Tuesdays and Thursdays" for everything in the north, a second "Mondays and Wednesdays" for the properties in the city. The trip between two regions then never arises, and within the day, gap-free booking clusters your appointments (consultation-hours rules, guide).
• In PROFESSIONAL: Integrated Blocker Management. A booked appointment also blocks the time in your other properties – you are never at two addresses at the same time. It follows the responsible person: all properties that run under you as resource contact behave like a single calendar, and appointments from Outlook, Google or a connected CRM count too (real-time availability).

If prospects want to see several of your properties anyway, offer them all in one widget – their free appointments come together in one calendar view (shared appointment overview).

If someone cancels the middle appointment

The chain doesn't break. The cancelled time becomes bookable again immediately and sits between two existing appointments – exactly where gap-free booking offers it next. In practice, the next prospect is more likely to fill it than a slot at the edge of the day. Cancellations go through the one-click link in every reminder email, so you don't have to release anything (Cancel bookings).

Which plan, how much effort

Gap-free appointment booking, buffer times and consultation-hours rules are included in every plan. One ticket activates a property for 30 days with an unlimited number of appointments; team members cost nothing extra (pricing). You need PROFESSIONAL for Integrated Blocker Management (real-time availability) – that is, for appointments to count as blockers across properties and from Outlook, Google or the CRM.

For setup, allow about a quarter of an hour: connect your calendar, store your consultation hours, set the buffer time per appointment type, send the link.

Relevant features

• Gap-free appointment booking
• Consultation-hours rules & buffer times
• Calendar synchronisation
• Shared appointment overview

Try it now

Put an end to unnecessary trips. Try it for free and let your viewing days be bundled automatically.