How to Create a Travel Expense Policy for Your Photography Business

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Before you and your client can sign off on a contract involving travel, you need to be very clear on a policy for these expenses. You don’t want to lose money on the contract, but you don’t want to spring an unexpected invoice on your client later, and expect them to pay it. You need a travel expense policy.

Photography is a geographically mobile business. You can work almost anywhere. Have camera, will travel. Some people tend to stay close to home. Others travel for nearly every assignment. Depending on the type of photography you produce, you may have no choice but to go far and wide. Travel and adventure photography is exactly what it says, after all.

Regardless of whether you travel regularly, or only once in your career, you need policies to account for the expenses. This not only affects your pricing, but protects you from out of pocket losses on cancelled contracts.

There is no hard and fast rule for dealing with travel expenses in your business policies, pricing, and contracts. The method you use will depend on what works best in your situation. There are, however, rules for dealing with travel expenses for income tax reporting. As always, you should consult with your certified accountant or tax professional to determine how these expenses should be treated for tax purposes. This article does not cover these issues. Instead, we want to take a look at how to consider travel expenses as a business policy.

Defining Travel Expense

Any photographer who works outside a studio or set business location will have some degree of travel expense. Regular and customary expenses are usually treated as a cost of doing business. Your offer will usually include a set number of acceptable miles, allowing for locations “within X miles” of a given point. Beyond your regular market area, you might surcharge for extra mileage. These fees are easy to calculate and collect, and are added into the total cost to your client. If the contract is cancelled, you’re not out anything, because you only incur the expense yourself as part of the contracted work.

A photographer who regularly travels to an area may have a standard fee that is automatically added to the contract. If you hold yourself out as a “Tuscany wedding photographer” or a “New York Fashion Week photographer” you should have a good idea how much it costs to get to, and work in, that location. Some brand photographers add a flat fee to any package that involves travel to the client location.

But what about uncustomary expenses? What if your project is a destination wedding or an on-location fashion shoot? Will it involve plane fare, hotels, extra time beyond the actual work day? These expenses are obviously specific to a contract and should be applied directly to that contract.

Before you and your client can sign off on a contract, you will need to be very clear on a policy for these expenses. You don’t want to lose money on the contract, but you don’t want to spring an unexpected invoice on your client later, and expect them to pay it.

Whether you have package fees for travel or customize your fees to your contract, you should come up with this figure before your contract is finalized. If time is of the essence, you can allow for additional charges, but your contract must be very clear that those additional charges are a part of the original contract.

Do not, however, be open ended with how and when charges are added.

Building Your Travel Policy

As the business owner, you decide what your policies will be. Is there a maximum distance you’ll drive before requiring a flight? Is there a set time in advance you want all bookings in hand? Do you want to be on location 24 hours ahead?

These considerations and more go into the policy that ultimately guides your fees.

Some potential issues you should consider when creating your travel policies:

Type of transportation required

Driving, air travel, train, taxi, etc

Lodging

Both enroute and on location

Additional time enroute

Travel time, preparation time before and after

Meals and sundries

Food, drink, snacks, supplies, personal care items

Expenses in your absence

Childcare, house- or pet-sitter

Decide how you want to handle each potential situation. What costs are involved and when are they passed on to the client? This the foundation for your travel policy. The rest of the structure is the application of your policy. Yes, the way you apply your policy is actually a part of your policy.

Applying Your Travel Policy

Any time you are expected to travel, you should also expect a very thorough consultation. Even the smallest missed detail can have consequences. “I thought you knew…” hits a sour note when something goes wrong.

Once you know what the client expects, and what you need in order to meet those expectations, you can begin to price your travel expenses.

To apply your travel policy, you need to determine:

• How to calculate your expected travel expense
• How to add this additional expense to your client’s fee
• When to collect the fee
• Who is responsible for booking travel, lodging, etc
• Whether (or not) and how you will communicate progress with your client
• How to structure your contract to be sure your expenses are covered even if the contract is cancelled

Let’s take a look at each of these.

Calculating travel expense

What you ultimately include in your expense figure is up to you. Some items, like air fare, fuel, and lodging will be simple to gather. The time you must commit to travel also has value. Some choose to add their hourly or daily rate, others don’t. Some even apply the time they spend making the arrangements.

Additional expenses as a result of travel all affect your bottom line. Whether you’ve already calculated them in your service price as a cost of doing business, or if you include them in your travel expense, be sure to account for them.

Billing the client

As already mentioned, if you bill travel expenses for a project, this should be separate from the service price. You can choose to invoice a lump sum, or present an itemized list. The disadvantage of an itemized list is that your client may see this as a chance to negotiate. Your choice of hotel might seem extravagant, or they may question the number of hours you’ve billed.

Unless your client specifically requires itemization, and this is a client you really want to work with, a lump sum simplifies things all the way around. You can indicate what the figure includes (air fare, lodging, meals for 3 days, etc) without itemizing. This helps the client understand you didn’t just come up with some arbitrary number to see if they’d pay it.

It should be very clear that your travel fees are exactly that. They do not apply to any service or portion of the contract. They stand alone and are payable to you in advance.

Collecting the travel fee

In a perfect world, you could pay your own expenses, do the work, and then bill the client somewhere along the way to get your money back. But we don’t live in a perfect world. It’s up to you to determine how much of your travel expense you want to pay upfront from your own funds. Obviously, the less out of your own pocket, the better.

Because most things must be booked in advance, it is reasonable to bill the client as early in the contract as possible. Likewise, you’ll need to make your travel arrangements early as well. The last thing you want is to find that the flight you need is sold out and the best option is a day earlier than you’d planned.

Keep to a strict payment date for your travel invoice. Your destination may be far away and the expenses considerable. In this case, your contract should allow for cancellation if your travel invoice is not paid on time.

Added expenses make no one happy.

Booking travel arrangements

In some cases, your client may offer to take care of your travel expenses directly. If the job is a destination wedding, for instance, the client probably already has guest lodging available. They might want to pay for your airline tickets themselves to have more control over costs.

Resist the urge to take them up on the offer. Even if the hotel is the convenient and practical choice, get the necessary information to make your own booking. That way you know for certain you haven’t been lost in the shuffle. It happens.

You also don’t want to find your budget flight lands mere hours before you’re due to start work, after three connections with lengthy layovers.

The best judge of your needs is you. Make your own arrangements.

Confirming progress

Set a timeline for your arrangements. Treat it as just another part of your workflow. Keep your client in the loop as things happen.

There are good reasons to followup with your client as you make your travel arrangements. The most important is the assurance to your client that you’ll be where you’re supposed to be, when you’re supposed to be there.

It’s also the perfect excuse to check in on our clients to be sure that everything is still on track. It wouldn’t be the first time a photographer found out days before an event that it had been cancelled weeks or even months earlier.

Protecting against cancellation

It is entirely possible that you could have a plane ticket and hotel reservations on your desk when the client tells you the wedding is off. Fortunately, because you collected your travel expense in advance, you’re only out the time it took you to make the bookings.

But what if the bookings were refundable? With no event, there’ll be no lodging, meals, or mileage. The client might feel that the money was for nothing and they are due a refund.

And they just might be.

Your contract should be very clear about what portion, if any, of travel expenses may be refundable. Anything incurred before the cancellation should be clearly classified as expensed out and nonrefundable.

Refund can be avoided altogether by stipulating that travel fees convert to liquidated damages if the client terminates the contract.

Even so, it is good practice to treat your travel surcharge monies like escrow. Set it aside in your account and don’t touch it for anything other than those necessary prepaid travel expenses. If you do have to refund money, you should always have money to refund.

Policies are Protection

Few photographers jet around liberally on someone else’s dime. Those who do are usually employees. They may or may not have to keep up with and report expenses. You, however, are running a business. If travel is part of your business, you will need a policy for both the travel and the expenses themselves.

Clear policies and contract language will prevent this added client cost from becoming a problem. They will also help you get where you need to be, when you need to be there, to do the job you need to do.

Safe and happy travels!