Multi-stop route planners compared
Multi-stop route planners are built for drivers visiting spread-out addresses, and they solve that problem well. Applied to door-to-door they optimise the wrong variable, because doors on one street are metres apart and the cost is deciding rather than travelling. They also model a stop as a task rather than a place with a history.
Built for a different job
Deliveries, service calls and scheduled appointments spread across a city. There the distance between stops is the dominant cost and minimising it is genuinely valuable.
Two mismatches with knocking
The optimisation target is wrong at thirty-foot spacing, and the data model is wrong because a stop is completed once while a door is visited repeatedly across a season.
Where they still help
If your day is driving between scheduled appointments, which is much of solar and roofing, a multi-stop planner is a reasonable fit for that half of the job. It is the walking half where it stops making sense.
Common questions
- Should I use a multi-stop planner for knocking?
- For driving between appointments, it can fit. For walking a street it optimises the wrong thing and forgets the door history.
- What is the main mismatch?
- It treats a stop as a task completed once. A door is a place you may visit several times over a season.
- Can I use both?
- Plenty of reps do — one for the drive, one for the street. It means two records, which is the cost.
More on routes
Planning the walk: ordering doors, cutting dead time between them, and route tools compared.
- Route planning for door-to-door
- What route optimisation actually saves you
- Walking routes versus driving routes
- Why nearest-door-first beats a planned list
- How many doors belong in one route
- Route planning apps for field reps
- Using Google Maps to knock, and where it breaks
- Free route planning for reps
- Taking a whole block at once