How to add travel time to Google Calendar

September 2026

Google Calendar has no travel-time setting. Apple Calendar has had one for years; Google has the location field, a map link, and nothing that keeps the road itself free. If you want the drive to a meeting to show in your day, you add it yourself. There are two ways.

The short answer

By hand: create an event before the meeting, another after it, name them, make them "busy" and guess the minutes. Automatically: connect DOFOTT once, set your home address, and every event with a location gets a block before and after it, timed by Google Maps. The rest of this page is the detail.

Method 1: by hand

Open the meeting and read its location.
Look the trip up in Google Maps for that time of day and note the minutes.
Create an event that ends when the meeting starts, as long as the trip. Set it to "Busy" so others cannot book over it. Name it so future you knows what it is.
Do the same after the meeting for the way back, and again for the next meeting somewhere else.

This works, and it is what most people do. Its cost shows up later. The meeting moves and the blocks stay where they were. The organiser changes the room across town and nothing tells your blocks. The return trip is the one you skip because you are in a hurry, and it is the one that makes you late for the next thing. And the minutes were a guess made on Tuesday for a drive on Friday.

Method 2: automatically

DOFOTT does the four steps for you and keeps doing them. You connect your Google account once and type your home address. From then on, every event in the calendars you ticked that has a location gets two blocks: one that ends when the event starts, one that begins when it ends. The length comes from Google Maps for that hour of that day, with traffic for driving and timetables for transit. The blocks are ordinary calendar events, so they show on your phone, in Outlook if you sync there, and to anyone who sees your free/busy time.

They move with the event. Drag the meeting to another hour and the blocks follow within seconds. Delete it and they go.
Both directions. The way back is a block too. Turn it off if you never need it.
Your way of travelling. Driving, transit, walking or cycling, set once. For a single trip, each block links to a small page where you change the mode, the starting address, or say "no travel time for this one".
Home and work. Add a work address and hours, and trips during the work day start from work, the rest from home.
Buffer. Five, ten or fifteen minutes on top of every trip, for parking and finding the door.

It never touches your own events. It only writes, moves and removes the blocks it created, each carrying a private tag it checks before doing anything. If you delete a block, it stays deleted.

Recurring meetings

A weekly meeting at the same place gets one recurring block, not fifty. Move or cancel one occurrence and only that date changes. This is the case the manual method loses first, because nobody maintains fifty blocks by hand.

Which one

If you have one trip a month, do it by hand and stop reading. If your week has meetings in more than one place, the manual method fails quietly and you find out in traffic. DOFOTT is free during the beta, needs a Google account and a Google Calendar, and takes about a minute to set up. Why Google Calendar leaves this to you is its own story.