Frequently Asked Questions

TravelSync is built for anyone who regularly drives to meetings and wants their calendar to reflect reality. The people who get the most out of it are:

• Business owners who travel to clients — you feel the problem personally and make your own purchasing decisions
• Consultants and freelancers — especially if you're also claiming mileage, the automatic HMRC mileage tracking is a genuine bonus
• Field sales and account managers — multiple client visits per day, tight schedules that need drive times built in
• PAs and EAs — booking meetings on behalf of someone who drives between appointments, where the calendar needs to show real availability

If you only ever attend virtual meetings or work from a fixed location, TravelSync probably isn't for you — it's specifically built around the problem of driving to physical meetings.

Yes — TravelSync supports both Google Calendar and Microsoft 365 / Outlook. When you sign in you can choose which provider to use. The engine works the same way regardless of which calendar system you're on.

Not directly yet. TravelSync connects to Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook, and native Apple Calendar support is on the roadmap.

There is a workaround that suits some Apple users in the meantime. Add a Google account to your iPhone, iPad or Mac (Settings, then Calendar, then Accounts), keep your meetings in that Google calendar, and connect the same Google account to TravelSync. Your Google calendar then appears inside the normal Apple Calendar app, and the travel blocks TravelSync creates sync straight back to your devices.

One catch worth knowing: this only works for meetings stored in the Google calendar. Apple doesn't share iCloud calendar data with Google, so anything kept in your default iCloud calendar stays invisible to TravelSync. The Apple Calendar app shows your iCloud and Google calendars together in one view, which makes it easy to assume they're talking to each other. They're not.

If you'd rather keep everything in iCloud, it's worth waiting for proper Apple Calendar support instead. If Apple support would make the difference for you, email us at support@travelsync.co.uk and let us know. The more people who ask, the sooner it moves up the list.

Getting started takes about 5 minutes:

1. Go to app.travelsync.co.uk and sign in with Google or Microsoft
2. A quick setup wizard opens automatically. It's three short steps.
3. Choose which calendars hold your meetings
4. We create a dedicated "Travel Blocks" calendar for you automatically (you can swap it for one of your own if you'd rather)
5. Enter your home and/or office address

That's it. TravelSync then builds your last 12 months of travel blocks automatically and emails you when it's ready, then keeps running every hour. Nothing to press.

The most common reasons:

• Events don't have a physical address — only meetings with a real location (not Zoom/Teams links) get travel blocks
• Wrong calendar selected — make sure the correct source calendar is ticked in Settings
• Engine hasn't run yet — click Run Now on the dashboard to trigger an immediate run

Check the activity log on the dashboard — it shows exactly what the engine found and did on each run.

To use TravelSync you need:

• A Google account (personal Gmail or Google Workspace) or a Microsoft account (Outlook, Hotmail, or Microsoft 365)
• Meetings in your calendar with a physical address in the Location field
• A modern browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge)

The engine checks every event in your selected calendars and filters out:

• All-day events
• Virtual meetings — Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, phone calls, and 70+ other keywords
• Events with no location
• Events marked as tentative or declined

Only events with a real physical address get a travel block created before them.

When you have multiple physical meetings in a day, TravelSync chains them intelligently:

• Instead of routing back to your office between meetings, it calculates travel directly from one meeting location to the next
• If the gap between meetings is large enough to include travel time, a return journey is created after the first meeting
• If two meetings are too close together to travel between, the engine flags this in the activity log

The engine uses the time of your meeting to decide:

• Between 9am–5pm: assumes you're starting from or returning to your office
• Before 9am or after 5pm: assumes you're starting from or returning home

Both your home and office addresses are set in Settings and can be updated at any time.

The engine runs automatically once per hour. You can also trigger a run manually at any time using the Run Now button on the dashboard.

Travel times are cached for 7 days, so repeated runs between the same locations are fast.

Yes — on each run the engine looks back 30 days as well as forward. This means if a meeting was recently added or changed, it will be picked up on the next run without you needing to do anything.

No. When your meetings show you are staying away, TravelSync books one journey out, the travel between your meetings while you are there, and one journey home at the end. Nothing in between.

It works this out from your calendar: several days of meetings in the same part of the country, far enough from home that driving back each night makes no sense.

Add an all-day event covering the days you are away, and put the address you are staying at in its location field. A postcode helps. Put it on one of the calendars TravelSync is watching, the same ones your meetings are on. If your hotel booking drops into that calendar automatically, that is usually all you need.

Every meeting inside those dates is then measured from that address rather than from home, so you get the ten minute hop across town instead of a six hour drive from your front door.

This is worth doing when there is nothing for TravelSync to work it out from: a first visit to a new city, venues whose addresses have no postcode, or a trip where you are getting there by train.

Because you might not be driving. When you tell TravelSync where you will be staying, it stops guessing at the long leg either end, since a train or a flight is just as likely as a car.

If you are driving and want that journey counted for mileage, leave the all-day event off. TravelSync will work the trip out from your meetings instead and include the drive up and the drive home.

Yes — TravelSync works with personal and business accounts for both providers: personal Gmail or Google Workspace for Google, and personal Outlook/Hotmail or Microsoft 365 for Microsoft.

If you use a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account, your IT administrator may need to allow third-party OAuth access. If you're unsure, try signing in — it will either work or give a clear error from your provider.

Yes — in Settings you can select multiple source calendars to monitor for physical meetings. All selected calendars are scanned on each run.

You also choose a separate calendar for travel blocks to be written into, keeping them organised and easy to identify.

The travel calendar is where TravelSync writes its drive time blocks, a dedicated calendar kept separate from your main diary. When you first set up, TravelSync creates one called "Travel Blocks" for you automatically, so there's nothing to do. If you'd prefer to use your own, you can pick a different one during setup or in Settings at any time.

Keeping them separate means your travel blocks are easy to show or hide as a layer in your calendar view, and you can clean them up without touching your actual meetings.

Yes. TravelSync connects to your Google or Microsoft account using OAuth2 — we never see or store your password. Only the access and refresh tokens needed to read and write calendar events are stored, and only the minimum permissions required are requested.

Your calendar data is never sold or shared with third parties.

TravelSync has also passed an independent CASA Tier 2 security assessment (OWASP ASVS Level 2) under Google's App Defense Alliance, renewed every year, and Google has verified how the app accesses your account data.

Use the Clean Up tool on the dashboard. You can choose to delete future blocks, past blocks, or all blocks. Cleanup runs in the background so you can navigate away without interrupting it.

Reset and Rebuild clears all existing travel blocks from your calendar and rebuilds everything from scratch, looking back two years (the current and previous tax year). It's useful if you've changed your home or office address, switched calendars, or something has gone wrong and you want a clean slate.

It runs in the background and emails you when it's done — typically takes a few minutes.

On the next run (within the hour, or immediately if you click Run Now), the engine will detect the change. It will remove any travel blocks that are no longer needed and create new ones if required for rescheduled meetings.

Yes. Every journey TravelSync creates is logged with the distance in kilometres. You can export a full mileage report from the Mileage page in the app.

The export includes HMRC mileage rate calculations — 55p/mile for the first 10,000 miles in the tax year (from 6 April 2026; 45p before then), 25p/mile thereafter — with a running total so you know exactly where you stand.

Yes — this is one of the most useful features for sole traders and consultants. Instead of reconstructing your mileage from memory or a pile of receipts at year-end, TravelSync captures every business journey automatically as it blocks the travel time in your calendar.

The mileage export applies HMRC Approved Mileage Allowance Payments (AMAP) rates and calculates your reclaimable amount. You still need to file correctly with HMRC, but the data is ready and accurate.

Yes — on the Mileage page you can filter the export by source calendar. Useful if you monitor multiple calendars and only want to report mileage from specific ones (e.g. client work only, not internal meetings).

CSV, which opens in Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets. It includes the date, meeting title, origin, destination, distance, duration, and HMRC calculations for each journey.

Yes. In Settings, you can set your vehicle type to Electric. When you do, TravelSync uses HMRC's Advisory Electric Rate (AER) instead of the standard AMAP rates: 7p per mile for home charging by default, and HMRC publishes 15p per mile for public charging. The rate is applied automatically in your mileage export.

There's no 10,000-mile threshold for EV drivers; the AER is a flat rate regardless of how much you drive. Set the public-charging rate, or a custom figure your company uses, in Settings.

You create rules with trigger keywords like #holiday or #sick. Add that keyword to a calendar event — either in the event title (e.g. "Annual Leave #holiday") or anywhere in the event description. Both are checked. TravelSync detects it and automatically replies to incoming emails using the template you've set for that keyword. Replies come from your own Gmail or Outlook account, not from TravelSync.

No. Each sender only receives one auto-reply per absence, even if they email you multiple times — and if two OOO periods overlap (say a conference during a longer holiday), they still hear back just once. TravelSync also skips automated emails from noreply addresses, system notifications, and mailing lists.

Yes. You can set up multiple rules — each with its own trigger keyword, subject line, and message body. So #holiday sends a different reply to #training or #sick. You can have up to 5 active rules at once.

No. The responder activates and deactivates automatically based on your calendar event dates. When the event ends, the replies stop. No manual toggle to remember.

Yes. Your dashboard shows a banner while an OOO period is active, and TravelSync emails you when auto-replies start and again when they finish — including how many replies it sent while you were away. These notices are on by default; you can switch them off under Notifications on the Out of Office page. There's also a Send test reply button on each rule that emails you a sample of exactly what senders will receive.

Yes. The auto-responder works with Gmail (via the Gmail API) and Microsoft Outlook (via Microsoft Graph). Replies appear in your Sent folder and thread correctly with the original message. The first time you use it you'll grant email access: Google users click a Connect email access button on the Out of Office page, and Microsoft users sign out and back in once. Until then the OOO settings stay unavailable.

Optionally, yes. There's a toggle on the OOO page that tells TravelSync to skip creating travel blocks for meetings on days you're marked as out of office. This keeps your calendar and mileage reports clean while you're away.

Yes. Turn on Departure Alerts in Settings and choose your lead time (5 to 30 minutes before departure). You can get a native calendar reminder on every travel block, an optional “Leave now” email with one-tap Google Maps and Waze links, or both — each is an independent toggle.

The reminder is added to your Travel Blocks calendar, so that calendar needs to be switched on (visible) with notifications enabled in your phone's calendar app. TravelSync applies your alert settings to your upcoming travel blocks automatically when you save, so there's nothing else to run.

An optional email that lands each morning with a quick summary of your day's travel — how many visits you have, your first departure time, and your total driving time and distance. Turn it on under Daily Briefing in Settings and pick a send time.

Only on days you actually have travel. If your calendar has no physical meetings that day, TravelSync skips the email rather than sending an empty one.

When you turn on Traffic Delay Warnings in Settings, TravelSync checks live traffic in the run-up to each journey. If the drive is going to be slower than usual by more than your chosen threshold, you get an email with an updated time to leave by, plus one-tap Google Maps and Waze links. On normal-traffic days you hear nothing.

Yes. Traffic always comes from Google Maps regardless of whether your calendar is Google or Microsoft, so Outlook users get the same warnings.