Home visits, zones and the driver app

A home visit does not book a chair — it books your team travelling to the guest. Picking the Home visit preset (or its own shape once picked) turns on everything this page covers: zones, the guest’s pin, the arrival window and the driver app at /app/visits.

Zones

A zone is the area you drive to, with its own travel fee and travel minutes. Add and edit zones on /app/bookings — the section only appears for a home-visit venue.

A zone is either:

• A ring — a centre point and a radius in metres.
• A polygon — three or more points tracing the area’s edge.

There is no map to drag. Enter a point either way:

• Type it as lat, lng.
• Paste a Google or Apple Maps link — the coordinates are read out of the link itself, on your device.

A polygon takes one point per line, at least three. Every zone also needs a name in both languages, a travel fee and travel minutes.

• Travel fee is rung at the register as an ordinary line when the visit happens — it is never added to a deposit and never charged by Qaema itself.
• Travel minutes pad the visit on both sides, the same way the gap between two bookings does, so your team’s drive there and back never overlaps the next visit.

Zones can overlap. When a guest’s pin falls inside more than one, the smallest one wins — carve an expensive pocket out of a cheaper, wider zone without ordering them.

Your own agent can manage zones the same way, with the list_zones, set_zone and remove_zone tools.

What the guest does

The booking page asks a home-visit guest for their location before it shows any times, using one of three ways — no map, no app permission beyond the browser’s own location prompt:

1. Use my location, the phone’s own GPS.
2. Paste a Google or Apple Maps link they were sent or copied.
3. Type coordinates, for the rare desktop case.

The moment a pin lands inside a zone, the guest is told the travel fee before they pick a time. A pin outside every zone is refused politely, with your other bookable services and your WhatsApp or phone number offered instead — a guest is never left with a dead end.

The guest also chooses whether to share this location with you. Declining does not stop the booking — you learn the address another way — but it means nothing beyond the matched zone is kept on the booking (see Retention, below). Once they share it, the guest can also leave a home type, a gate or building note, and say whether someone will be home; a guest who declines is told instead that you will contact them for the address.

A booking made by you or your team does not need a pin at all — you already know the address. Only a guest booking on their own, including through their own AI assistant, must set one.

The arrival window

A guest is told a window, never an exact time — “between 3:00 and 4:00”, not “at 3:00”. Your team, on the driver app and on Today, sees the exact planned start.

The window’s length is arrival_window_min, 60 minutes by default. Change it in Setup › Rules (Arrival window for home visits, 15 to 240 minutes, beside how long a pin is kept), or with your agent’s set_book_settings tool.

The driver app

/app/visits is your team’s own screen for the day: every home visit, in order, each with the guest’s name, the exact time and the window underneath it, the zone, the travel fee and the gate note when one was left. A Directions link opens the pin in Google Maps.

Two buttons per visit:

• On our way — sends the guest a WhatsApp message that you’re on the way. It sends once per visit; tapping it again (or a slow connection retrying) never sends a second message.
• Done — completes the visit.

A tap that fails says so, with a Retry that redoes exactly that tap.

The page refreshes itself once a minute, the same way the register’s own bookings list does — nothing pushes to it. It is installable exactly like the owner dashboard: its own icon and start URL, no install prompt and no offline support, so your team adds it to their phone’s home screen by hand — open /app/visits in the phone’s browser, then “Add to Home Screen” (iPhone: the Share button; Android: the browser menu).

Anyone on your team can open it: a staff member is confined to their own day the way they already are everywhere else in Book.

How long a pin is kept

A pin is only ever visible for driving to — not as a standing address book. Two separate limits:

• On the day. The driver app and Today show the exact coordinates only on the venue-local day the visit happens. Before and after that day, staff still see the zone, the label and the gate note — enough to plan, not an address.
• After the visit. location_retention_days (default 30, in the Setup page’s Rules) counts days past the booking’s own end. Once it passes, the pin, the label, the gate note and every other detail the guest gave are cleared from the booking for good — along with the vehicle plate and its region, on the same clock. The zone stays, because it’s coarse enough to keep for your own records, and undoing or reopening an old booking never brings the cleared details back.

The venue’s privacy page tells guests about this in both languages.