Going Mobile - Bookings That Travel With You

A mobile trader is anyone whose booking address isn’t a shop-it’s the client’s kitchen, driveway, spare room, front yard, or living room. Mobile barbers, mobile beauticians, mobile nail techs, mobile dog groomers, mobile PTs, mobile car detailers. Most booking software is built for a fixed shop and quietly falls apart the minute the address becomes the client’s, not yours.

This guide is the practical playbook: what changes when you go mobile, why the ‘hybrid’ option exists, and the exact settings to turn on before you take the first booking.

What’s actually different about mobile

A fixed-shop booking is simple-the client picks a slot, they show up at your address, your calendar just has to know your working hours. A mobile booking has three extra moving parts:

The client’s address has to be captured at booking, not typed into a note field afterwards
Travel time between jobs has to be part of the calendar, or you’ll double-book yourself into a job in Croydon after one in Camden
A service radius has to gate the booking form, or you’ll get a request from 90 miles away that you can’t sensibly say no to on the day

If any one of those three is missing, mobile bookings feel like fixed-shop bookings held together with tape. All three together, and it’s the same frictionless flow your clients are used to.

Fixed, mobile, or hybrid

Rexabook has three work modes, and picking the right one is the whole game:

Fixed-one address, clients come to you. Standard shop setup. Skip the rest of this guide.
Mobile-you travel to every client. No shop, no salon chair, van or kit bag only. The booking form asks for the client’s address; travel time is built into the calendar.
Hybrid-you have a shop and you travel. Half your week is in the chair, half is home visits, or you run a shop with a mobile weekend service. The client picks per booking: ‘Come to me’ or ‘I’ll come to you.’

Hybrid is the underrated one. If you already own a chair and you’re wondering whether adding mobile is worth it, the answer is almost always yes-you get a wider catchment on quiet days without giving up shop bookings on busy ones. The setup is the same.

The benefits, honestly

Mobile bookings have real upside and one honest downside. First, the upside:

Lower overhead. No rent, no rates, no storefront insurance. A mobile barber netting $50 a cut keeps a much bigger share of it than a chair-renter paying $250/week for the chair.
Wider catchment. A shop pulls from about 1 mile of foot traffic. A mobile trader with a 10-mile service radius pulls from about 300 square miles-roughly 300× the addressable market at the same effort.
Premium pricing lands better. Clients happily pay $13-$25 more for at-home service. You’ve done the travel, they’ve saved the trip. The math works.
Fewer no-shows on the return trip. Repeat clients who’ve had you in their living room are far less likely to ghost the rebook than clients who barely remember which salon they were in. Retention numbers we see are meaningfully higher on mobile.

The downside is unavoidable: you’re paying for the travel in time. Every hour on the road is an hour not doing paid work. Which is why travel time in the calendar isn’t a nice-to-have-it’s what stops the math from breaking.

Setting it up - the 6 fields that actually matter

Enabling mobile is one dashboard page. Settings → Business Profile → Mobile & Travel. The fields, in the order you should fill them:

Work mode. Pick mobile or hybrid. This is the master switch-it turns on address collection at booking and travel time on the calendar.
Home base. Drop a pin on the map at your house, your van’s overnight parking spot, or wherever you start the day from. This is the anchor for the service radius and the first-job-of-the-day travel time. Zip code fallback works, but the pin is more accurate.
Service radius. How far you’re willing to travel. Type a number, pick miles or km. 5-10 miles is typical for barbers and beauticians; groomers and PTs often go further because the job is longer.
Transport mode. Driving, cycling, walking, public transit. Driving is the default and covers 95% of mobile traders. Cycling matters if you’re an urban mobile barber-a 3-mile cycle isn’t 6 minutes, it’s 20, and the calendar needs to know.
Travel buffer. A cushion after travel. Default is 30 minutes. That’s parking, unloading the kit, greeting the dog, setting up the chair. Set it low for kit-bag jobs (10-15 minutes), high for kit-heavy jobs (45-60 minutes).
Travel areas (optional). Zip code zones with days of the week attached. ‘SE22 and SE23 on Wednesdays, everything else on the north side of the river Thursday-Saturday.’ Optional-if you don’t set any, the service radius is the only gate.

That’s it. Save. The booking form is now mobile-shaped. If you’re hybrid, add a second location for the shop (Settings → Locations → Add → Fixed) and clients get a ‘come to me / I’ll come to you’ step at booking.

What the client sees

The booking flow adds one step: enter your address. U.S. clients enter a zip code and the address auto-completes; international clients get a full address form. There’s a ‘Use my location’ button that reads their browser GPS if they’d rather not type.

If the address is outside your service radius, the booking form tells them politely-‘we don’t currently travel to that zip code’-and offers to add them to a waitlist. No wasted booking that you have to cancel manually.

If you’ve set up travel areas with days of the week, the calendar only shows slots on the days you cover their area. A client in SE22 requesting a Thursday won’t see any slots if Thursday is the north-of-river day. This is the single most overlooked feature-it stops you constantly zig-zagging across a city because the calendar wouldn’t push back.

What the calendar does

Every candidate slot goes through a travel-time check before it’s offered:

Home base for the first job of the day. Travel time is calculated from your home base to the client. If it doesn’t fit before your first working hour, the slot isn’t offered.
Previous job address for every other slot. After the first booking, the anchor becomes wherever the previous client is. A 9 AM in Camden means the 10 AM slot is only offered to clients within driving distance of Camden, not clients on the other side of London.
Eased buffer for same-location back-to-backs. Two clients in the same building (a couple, a family) don’t need a 30-minute travel buffer between them. The calendar detects same-location and reduces the buffer smoothly.
Tight-travel warning on manual bookings. If you’re adding a booking yourself and the travel is uncomfortably close-‘Travel tight: 52 min drive + 30 min buffer’-a modal asks you to confirm. You can override; it just makes sure it’s a decision, not an accident.

The travel time estimate uses a road-distance factor of 1.3× straight-line for driving (accurate for most U.S. cities) and hits proper routing APIs for cycling and public transit. It’s not GPS-perfect, but it’s calibrated to be slightly pessimistic-if the calendar says it fits, it fits.

Deposits and card-on-file - especially important for mobile

Mobile no-shows cost more than shop no-shows. A shop no-show means an empty chair for 45 minutes. A mobile no-show means an empty chair plus the round-trip travel you’ve already done. If a client’s not home when you knock, you’ve eaten an hour or more.

Two things stop this from being a real problem:

Card-on-file at booking. New clients enter a card; you charge it if they no-show. Deters about 90% of the ‘I might be in’ bookings.
Deposits for new clients only. $6.50-$13 deposit for first-ever bookings, waived for regulars. High enough to filter, low enough to keep conversion healthy.

Both are in the base subscription. Cancellation policy text sits alongside them-the client agrees to it at booking, it’s quoted in the confirmation email, and if a dispute lands you’ve got a paper trail. See the deposits and card-on-file guide for the details.

What’s not shipped (yet)

Two things people ask about that Rexabook doesn’t do today:

Per-mile travel surcharges. Charging $1.50/mile past 5 miles. It’s on the roadmap but not shipped.
The workaround: bake travel into the service price, or offer a ‘premium travel zone’ service variant priced $13 higher.
Per-service travel time. All services use the same travel buffer. You can’t say ‘haircuts have 15 min setup, lash sets have 45 min setup.’ Workaround: set the buffer to the higher number, or split into separate services and use the trailing buffer field.

Both are honest gaps. Neither is a dealbreaker in practice-traders route around them with pricing.

One caveat: Live Availability hides

The storefront’s ‘Right now’ panel-the ‘next available slot in Camden today at 2:30 PM’ signal that shows above the service menu on fixed-shop pages-hides itself on pure mobile pages. Reason: mobile availability depends on where the client is, and the storefront doesn’t know that at page load. A generic ‘wide open this week’ signal would be misleading.

Hybrid traders do get the panel (it shows availability at the fixed location). If you want the live-availability signal and you’re pure mobile, the fix is to add a nominal fixed location (even if you rarely use it) and become hybrid.

The setup, end to end

Fifteen minutes, one dashboard page:

Settings → Business Profile → Mobile & Travel. Set work mode to mobile or hybrid.
Drop the home-base pin. Use the map, not the zip code.
Service radius + transport mode. 5-10 miles, driving, is the sensible default.
Travel buffer. 30 min unless your kit is heavier or lighter than average.
Travel areas (optional). Only if you want day-of-week zoning.
Card-on-file on, deposits for new clients only. See the deposits guide.

Take a test booking to yourself before going live. Book a 2 PM at a friend’s address, check the confirmation email quotes the address, check the calendar shows the travel time gap. If it all reads clean, share the link.

The honest summary

Mobile bookings work when three things are true: the client’s address is captured cleanly at booking, travel time is enforced by the calendar, and there’s a financial consequence for no-shows. Rexabook gives you all three in the base subscription, no add-ons, no per-mile fees, no separate mobile app to download.

If you’re hybrid-shop plus mobile-the setup is the same. If you’re pure mobile-kit bag, van, no shop-the setup is the same. Fifteen minutes, and the booking page is on the client’s phone.

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Rexabook's base includes mobile mode, home base, travel-time-aware calendar, service radius, travel areas, and card-on-file no-show protection. 7-day free trial. No card required.

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