Event Timeline Builder

It opens with a sample evening already in it.

Pickup at 6:00 pm, a drive to the first venue, the venue, a drive to dinner, dinner, the ride home, drop-off at 10:30 pm. You can change the pickup time, delete any block between pickup and drop-off with the trash icon, shuffle blocks up or down with the arrows, and add a new one by typing a name and choosing 30, 45, 60, 90, 120 or 180 minutes. New blocks land just before drop-off, and every clock time below a change recalculates itself. Print sends the finished schedule to your browser's print dialog, where most browsers will also save it as a PDF.

One limit shapes how you work: block lengths cannot be edited. To change one, delete it, add it again at the new length, and walk it back into place with the arrows. Pickup is always first and drop-off is always last.

Each block begins the instant the one above it ends. Nothing sits between them unless you put it there.

That is why the sample carries three 30-minute drive blocks: out to the first venue, across to dinner, and home again. Delete those three and drop-off jumps from 10:30 to 9:00 pm, which is a fast and slightly alarming picture of how much of an evening is spent moving.

So give every leg a block of its own. Drive to Midtown, 30 minutes. Drive home to Katy, 45. The route planner has typical Houston drive times between areas to fill them with. The shortest available block is 30 minutes, which is longer than plenty of Inner Loop hops, and that is no bad thing, because loading a group, finding a curb and counting heads takes time the map never shows you.

Somewhere near a round number, ideally, because that is how hours get quoted.

Among Houston inquiries in our records with a requested duration, about 53% asked for three to four hours, about 34% for five to six, and about 11% for seven to eight. Across all the markets we have on record the pull toward shorter bookings is stronger still, with about 69% asking for three to four. The sample timeline, one venue and a dinner, runs four and a half hours from pickup to drop-off, an hour and a half of that behind the windshield.

If your finished plan spills a little past a round number, that is worth knowing before you ask for a price, because trimming a single 30-minute block might drop the night a whole step. If it spills a lot, the plan has one stop too many for the hours you had in mind.

Seventeen colleagues are taking a retiring manager to dinner in the Galleria and drinks in Montrose, leaving from a house in Sugar Land on a weekday. Set pickup to 6:30 pm, delete everything the sample put between pickup and drop-off, then add these in order. Give the drive in 45 minutes rather than the planner's typical 32 on US-59/I-69, which will be optimistic at that hour.

Five hours exactly, with no slack anywhere in it.

So the honest request is five hours and a plan to leave the bar when you said you would, or six if the speeches at dinner look likely to run. For seventeen people who mainly want to sit and talk, an 18 passenger Escalade limo or a 20 passenger party bus both work, and the retirement parties page covers the rest.

The example also steps around the four usual traps. Timelines without drive blocks look two hours shorter than the night will be. A 60-minute restaurant block rarely survives seventeen people ordering, eating and splitting a check. Multiple pickups each need a block, since collecting three households can take as long as the run downtown. And the ride home is on the clock even though the party finished twenty minutes ago.

Print it or save it as a PDF, put it in the group chat so nobody has to ask what time the bus comes, and send it along when you request a quote so the hours match the plan. Weddings have their own shape, which the wedding transportation timeline is built around. If the total hours came as a surprise, the party bus cost guide explains how booking length moves a quote.