>Hello all,
>
>I was curious how people charge when they need to travel out of the area to a client site for multiple days. Obviously you bill all expenses and mileage, but what counts as billable time? Do you charge a higher rate? Do you charge for travel time even though you're charging mileage? Do you charge for all meals? For how many hours a day do you bill? Etc.

Hi Dan,

Interesting question. Most of the times, when I see clients locally, I would spend the whole day with them. When I leave for 30-45 minutes to have lunch, I don't bill them for that time or the cost of lunch, so I guess I would do the same about seeing out of town clients.

The hotel stay, however, is something I would bill.

I don't bill for milleage, but would bill for any travel time over 1 hour. If I had to take a plane or incurr on some major expense to get there, I would pass it to the client, and now that I think of it, the milleage is to cover the cost incurred to travel and it should be separate from the hourly rate you bill for travel.

Let me give you an example regarding billing for travel time: if it takes you 4 hours to get to your client and back, those are 4 hours that you will be wasting. You could spend that time working on another project and billing for it. Since this client is taking you away from that, I think he should pay.

In trying to be fair, I would take public transportation whenever possible so that instead of driving (which I stopped hating since I found books on tape) I can spend the time working on the client's project (either on paper, laptop, or plain thinking and pondering).

I'm sure others will come with other approaches, and even though I haven't been in this situation too many times, I would also like to read more on the subject.

Alex