How We Count Kilometres and Hours

Why this page exists

Ambiguity about how kilometres are counted is the single most common cause of disputes at drop-off in Indian car rental. A figure that looked clear enough when you enquired can turn out to mean something different once the trip is done, and by then you are standing at your own gate with a driver waiting to be paid and a number in front of you that nobody explained in advance. We publish our method here so there is nothing left to argue about: before you enquire, on the written quotation, and again on the duty slip you sign at pick-up and at drop.

Two figures usually decide what you actually pay on a trip priced by distance: the kilometres the car is deemed to have covered, and the minimum that gets applied under them. Both can be counted in more than one way, and an operator does not always say which way it counts them until the bill is in front of you. Is the distance measured from your own address, or from wherever the car happened to be parked before it came to you? Does the return leg of a round trip count for what it actually ran, or does it get rounded up to look like a longer one-way fare? Is a multi-day minimum applied once for the whole booking, or once for every single day the car is held, whatever it actually covered? This page answers each of those questions in one place, in the order they come up on an actual trip, rather than leaving you to piece the answer together from separate lines on a quotation, a duty slip and a set of terms you read once at the very start and never again.

The method below is not particular to one page or one route. It is the method behind every fare on this site worked out from kilometres, an outstation drop, a round trip, an airport or a railway transfer, or a multi-day tour, and every page that quotes you such a fare is quoting it on this basis. Where one route works differently, because it is sold at a single published fixed figure instead, that is stated here as the one exception it is, so you are never left guessing which basis applies to the quotation in front of you.

The basis: point to point

We measure point to point: from the address the car picks you up at to the address it drops you at. There is no garage mileage added at either end. The basis is printed on your quotation and on your duty slip.

That means the count does not start when the car leaves our yard to come to you, and it does not continue after it has dropped you. It starts at your pick-up address and it stops at your drop address, on the odometer, every time.

What counts

Every kilometre the car covers between your pick-up address and your drop address, on the odometer, in both directions on a round trip.

Before pick-up

The distance the car covers reaching your address for pick-up, from wherever it was coming from, is not on your bill.

After drop

The distance the car covers once it has dropped you, on its way to wherever it goes next, is not on your bill either.

The driver's own stops

A stop the driver makes for his own fuel, food or rest does not add to your kilometres, and neither does the time you spend waiting for him at an address you have already given.

Here is what that looks like on an actual trip. Say your pick-up address and your destination are 180 kilometres apart, and you are travelling there and back over two days for a family function. The out leg, from your address to the destination, is 180 kilometres; the return leg, from the destination back to your address, is another 180 kilometres; so the round trip counts 360 kilometres on the odometer in total, both legs measured from your own address and to your own address. It makes no difference to that figure whether the car had covered another twenty kilometres reaching you that morning, or has another thirty to cover once it has dropped you home that evening. Those distances belong to the car's own movements, not to your trip, and neither one ever appears on your bill.

Outstation, one way and round trip

A one-way drop is one leg: the kilometres between your pick-up address and your drop address, and nothing further. The run the car makes to get back afterwards is ours to carry, not yours to pay for.

This holds however far that return run turns out to be, and whether the driver picks up another booking on the way back or returns empty. Once your one-way leg ends at your drop address, the count for that trip has stopped. What the vehicle does next is our arrangement to make, not a cost that finds its way back onto your bill.

A round trip is two legs, out and back, both on the odometer, both counted from your address and finished at your address. A return trip counts the two legs it actually runs and nothing beyond them; it is not loaded to approximate a longer one-way fare.

The two legs do not have to be identical to each other. If your outward journey runs a different road to your return, because of a diversion, a closed stretch, or a stop you asked to make along the way, both legs are still counted on the odometer for what they actually covered, not against a distance worked out in advance and then applied twice. The figure on your quotation before the trip is our best estimate against the addresses you have given us; the figure on your duty slip at the end is what the car actually ran, and that is the one your final fare is worked from.

Where the car is held for more than a day, the days themselves are counted as calendar days rather than as blocks of twenty-four hours: a car that leaves on Friday morning and returns on Sunday evening is three days, and the quotation states the number before you confirm it.

The distinction matters because a calendar-day count and a rolling twenty-four-hour count rarely agree. A car out from Friday morning to Sunday evening covers a little over two twenty-four hour blocks, but it touches three separate calendar dates, and calendar dates are what we count, in the same way a hotel counts nights rather than hours. Driver allowance is worked out on the same calendar-day basis, day for day, and it is set out in full at /legal/driver-allowance, so the two running totals on your quotation, the kilometres and the days, are always counted on a basis that agrees with each other.

The minimum, and how it is counted

A minimum of 250 kilometres applies to the whole trip, never to each day of it. This is stated to you before you enquire, on the tariff page, on the quotation and in these terms, never disclosed for the first time at the end of your trip.

A minimum exists because even a short trip commits a vehicle and a driver for the better part of a working day: the run to reach you, the driver's own time, and the vehicle being unavailable for another booking while it is out on yours. Every operator in this trade prices for that in some form. Where operators differ, and differ in a way that can cost a customer real money on a longer booking, is in how often that floor gets applied across a trip that runs more than a single day.

Where the trip runs less than 250 kilometres, the distance line on your quotation is worked from 250 kilometres instead. Where it runs further, you pay what the odometer shows. Either way, the figure is worked out once for the trip as a whole, not once for each day the car is held. A trip held for three days does not become three minimums: it is the same one floor, applied once, against the kilometres the whole trip runs.

This is stated plainly because most operators in this trade apply their minimum once for every calendar day the car is held, so a trip of several days can be billed at several times the daily floor, whether the car covers that distance or not. The table below sets both approaches against each other for the same booking, on the assumption that the trip runs under the minimum on every one of its days, which is common on a wedding booking or a business trip where the car spends more time waiting than driving.

Take the three-day row on its own. A car booked for three days that covers, say, 210 kilometres across all three, under the floor on every single one of them, is charged for 250 kilometres on this site: the floor, applied once, against the trip as a whole. Under the once-a-day convention, the same three-day booking is charged as though the car had covered 750 kilometres, three times the floor, regardless of what the odometer actually shows. Extend the same booking to a fortnight and the gap widens with every day it runs. It is worth checking directly against any other quotation you are holding for a multi-day trip: ask whether the minimum is applied once for the trip or once for every day it is held, because the answer changes the bill by a multiple of the number of days, not by a small amount.

The minimum does not apply to a route with a published fixed price. A fixed price is the price; a floor under it would mean the figure on the page is not the figure on the quotation, which is the one thing this site is not willing to let happen. The one route it applies to is set out in full in the next section.

Airport and railway transfers

An airport transfer or a railway station transfer is counted the same way as any other point-to-point drop: from your address to the terminal kerb or the station gate, or from the kerb or the gate to your address, on the odometer, with the same minimum described above. Nothing is added for the drive back afterwards. The counting basis for these two services is stated in full at /airport-taxi and /railway-station-taxi.

A good many operators price an airport or a railway run off a fixed slab instead: one flat figure for anywhere inside a named zone or a distance bracket, worked out once and applied to every address inside it, whether yours sits at the near edge of that zone or the far one. We do not run a slab table for these transfers. The kilometres are worked from your actual pick-up or drop address to the terminal or the station, the same way they are worked for any other drop on this site, so two customers travelling to two different addresses that another operator might treat as one zone are quoted two genuinely different figures.

Where an airport has more than one terminal, the kilometres are counted to the terminal your flight actually uses, not to the airport treated as a single point. The same principle holds at a railway station with more than one usable gate or entrance: it is the real point of pick-up or drop that the kilometres are worked from, never a single averaged figure for the whole complex.

One route on this site does not work this way at all. The Panipat to Delhi drop is sold at a published fixed figure per car rather than at a per-kilometre rate, because the car is repositioning to Delhi in any case. Nothing is counted on that route: the fare for your class is the published figure, whatever the odometer shows, and it is set out in full at /panipat-to-delhi. Every other transfer on this site, in either direction, is priced by distance as described above.

Multi-day tours

On a multi-day tour, kilometres run on the odometer across the whole trip and are totalled once at the end, rather than reset each morning against a distance decided in advance. A day spent on foot in one town adds the driver allowance for that day and whatever the car actually ran, which can be little or nothing, rather than a fixed daily figure.

Take a five-day tour where the first day covers 260 kilometres reaching the first stop, the second and third are spent largely on foot in that town with the car doing perhaps 20 kilometres of local running on each of those two days, and the last two days cover 240 kilometres each on the way home. The kilometres for the whole tour are simply added up across all five days on the odometer, whatever that comes to at the end, rather than the tour being pre-priced against a daily distance figure that assumes every day looks like a driving day.

The 250 kilometre minimum applies once to the whole tour, exactly as it does on a shorter trip, and not once for each day of it. A trip of any real length clears it on the total kilometres run without needing to be topped up. The count starts where the car picks you up and stops where it drops you, at the end of the tour.

Driver allowance on a multi-day tour is worked out separately from the kilometres, day for day rather than distance for distance, and it is set out in full at /legal/driver-allowance. The two running totals on your tour quotation, the kilometres for the whole trip and the days for the whole trip, are counted independently of each other, and both are stated to you before you confirm.

Evidence: the duty slip and the odometer

Your duty slip shows the opening and closing odometer readings and the opening and closing times, and you sign it. Where GPS tracking is fitted to the vehicle, you are entitled to see that record corroborating the duty slip, on request.

The duty slip is filled in and signed at the start and at the end of the trip, not reconstructed afterwards. If a figure on it does not match what you have seen on the odometer yourself, raise it before you sign.

Your signature on the duty slip means you have checked the figures against what you can see on the vehicle yourself, not merely that you were told them. Read the opening reading before the trip starts and the closing reading before you sign at the end, and treat the few seconds that takes as part of the trip rather than a formality to get past quickly. Once signed, the duty slip is the record of the trip, for both sides.

Not every vehicle on the road carries GPS tracking. Where a vehicle does, the record is available to you alongside the duty slip, on request, and the two normally agree because both are reading the same trip. Where a vehicle does not carry it, the duty slip itself, filled in and signed at both ends of the trip, is the record for that trip, in exactly the same way it would be for any transport operator working before GPS tracking became common in this trade.

Rounding

Where a distance or a duration does not come to a whole unit, it is rounded in your favour: a distance is rounded down to the nearest whole kilometre and a part day is never charged as a full extra day. We do not round up to reach a rounder figure.

A round trip that comes to 347.6 kilometres on the odometer is billed as 347 kilometres, not 348. The fraction is dropped rather than rounded to the nearest whole number, so it always works in your favour and never against it.

The same principle applies to days. A trip planned for three days that in practice runs a little past midnight on the third night is not, on that account alone, billed as a fourth day. The number of days on your quotation reflects the trip as it was actually run, worked out sensibly rather than mechanically against the exact clock time of your return.

Disputes

If a figure on the duty slip does not match the odometer in front of you, or you disagree with the kilometres or the days charged, say so at drop-off before you sign, and the driver notes it on the slip alongside your own reading.

• Read the closing odometer figure yourself before you sign, and check it against the figure written on the slip.
• If the two do not match, or you disagree with the number of days charged, say so on the spot and have your own reading noted on the slip alongside the driver's, before either of you signs it.
• Keep your own copy of the signed duty slip. It is the reference the office, and, where fitted, the GPS record, are checked against if the query needs to go further.

If it is not resolved on the spot, write to us with the duty slip reference: sachin@om-travels.in or +91 99966 69190. Our Grievance Officer and the full escalation ladder are published in full at /grievance-redressal.

Raising a figure at drop-off costs you nothing and is the fastest way to have it corrected, while the driver, the vehicle and the reading are all still in front of you. Raising it afterwards, in writing, from the duty slip reference, reaches the same place; it simply takes longer.