How to pick a meeting spot for a field team spread across a city

Pick a field team's meeting spot by the drive time from where each person starts their day, not by the middle of the map. Draw a travel area from each person's start, look for the place where those areas overlap, then choose the spot inside that overlap where the longest single journey is shortest, the roads are moving at the meeting hour, and there is somewhere to park and sit. The geographic centre is often a river, a ring road or a business park nobody can reach at 08:00.

This is for managers of sales reps, engineers, inspectors, merchandisers and care workers who meet once a week or once a month: a briefing, a training morning, a handover of stock. It covers the two ways to judge fairness, a worked example in Johannesburg, the traps, and an AI employee that checks the options.

Fair to whom? Two ways to judge a spot

There are two honest answers to "which spot is best", and they often disagree.

• Least total travel: add up everyone's minutes and pick the lowest sum. Good for the company's time, but it can leave one person driving 50 minutes while the rest drive 10.
• Shortest longest journey: pick the spot where the person with the furthest drive has the shortest drive possible. Fairer to the person at the edge, and usually the better choice for a weekly meeting.

Write down which rule you are using before you look at the options. Otherwise the choice drifts toward whoever argues hardest, or toward the manager's own commute.

How to read travel areas for a meeting

The Travel area block draws what can be reached from a place by car, on foot or by bike, within a travel time (up to 15 minutes for now) or a distance by road. Draw one from each person's start: their home, or the depot where they collect a van. Put them on one map.

• Where every area overlaps, everyone is within that time. If such a place exists, your search is almost done.
• Where all but one overlap, you have found who is the outlier. Either accept a longer drive for them, or meet in two groups.
• Where nothing overlaps, the team is too spread for one 15-minute meeting point. Widen the time to the limit, meet online, or hold two regional meetings.

The hour matters as much as the place

A spot that is 12 minutes away at 10:00 can be 30 at 08:00. Drawn travel areas use typical road speeds, not today's traffic. To see how the roads around a candidate spot are moving at the hour you will meet, run Traffic Flow at that hour on a normal working day. It gives the current speed, the free-flow speed and a jam factor from 0 to 10 on the roads around the spot. It does not count cars and has no history of peaks, so to compare 08:00 with 09:30, run it at both times on a few days and keep the readings.

Moving a weekly meeting from 08:00 to 09:30 often helps more than moving it across town.

A worked example in Johannesburg

A made-up case. A pest control firm has six technicians who start from home across Johannesburg and meet every Monday to collect chemicals and go over the week. The manager compares three spots. The minutes below are invented, to show the reading.

Made-up drive times at 08:00, for illustration only.

Spot A is closest for four people and the manager's favourite, but two technicians drive over half an hour. Spot B has both the lowest total and the shortest longest journey, so it wins on either rule. Traffic Flow at B on two Monday mornings shows a jam factor around 4 on the junction road, so the meeting moves to 08:30 and the jam has eased by then. B also has a fuel station with parking for six vans, which a cafe in a busy street does not.

Mistakes to avoid

• Choosing the middle of the map. The centre point of six homes can be a nature reserve or the far side of a river.
• Ignoring parking. Field teams arrive in vans. A spot with nowhere to leave six vans costs everyone the time they saved.
• Testing traffic once. One morning reading can be a crash or a school holiday. Look at several normal working days.
• Keeping the spot for ever. When someone leaves or joins, the fair spot moves. Check again each time the team changes.
• Forgetting the day after. If the team goes on to customers from the meeting, a spot nearer where the work is can beat the fairest spot.

Doing it with an AI employee

An AI employee can check candidate spots before the next meeting and tell you which one is fairest that week. The blocks, in order:

1. My data: a table of each person's starting point, and a second table of candidate spots (a depot, a fuel station, a hotel with meeting rooms).
2. Travel area: 15 minutes by car from each starting point, so the map shows the overlap.
3. Nearby places: around each candidate spot, count cafes, parking and fuel stations within a short walk.
4. Traffic Flow: the speed and jam factor on the roads next to each spot, with the flow scheduled for the meeting hour.
5. xMap LLM: rank the spots by your chosen fairness rule, using only the figures given, with one line on why.
6. Show on a map and Email: the ranking and the map to you on the Friday before.

What arrives: a ranked list of spots with what is around each and how the roads were moving, and a map with everyone's areas. If you want the next step too, Route planner can start each person's day from the meeting spot. Visit plans for my medical reps, by an AI agent and Store visit route for a due diligence trip show the same thinking applied to the visits after the meeting.