Our policy since 2008: you may not ask a client to meet you halfway between your location and theirs unless you let us know in advance.
Background: in a very few cases, a tutor has accepted an assignment and then, without letting us know, asked the parent to meet him/her at a location closer to the tutor. This is not acceptable to us. Our company name is In-Home Tutors and a key selling point is that we save the parent from having to drive their child to yet another appointment. In general, we expect the tutor to meet the client at their home.
Where things get murky is that occasionally we simply cannot find a tutor within a reasonable distance of the client. So we find ourselves calling the client to see if they will meet the tutor at a halfway point. If the client has no better alternative, they will often agree to this, especially if we are willing to discount our fee. But we need to be the ones making this decision.
If you take a tutoring assignment in good faith and then find that it takes longer than you realized, let us know, and we can decide whether to offer the client a new tutor who may live closer, or negotiate with the client for them to meet you at a closer location. We can often work something out. Everyone knows how bad rush-hour traffic can get, and sometimes it is no problem for the parents to drop off their child at a local library (or indeed for the child to drive themselves to meet with the tutor). But, to repeat, you must let us know about such arrangements.
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