Is it worth me continuing with this lesson?

[Janeyjacke]

It's tutoring for a friend of a friend. On a Monday I work 8-5, then commute by public transport, my buses are always late so sometimes I'll have to take an Uber to get there for the allocated time.

It's 12 miles from my workplace to the pupil's home, and then it's just over 30 minutes from their home back to mine.

It's an hour's lesson for £20.
However with the travel it's taking up nearly 3 hours of my evening, though if I stopped it I'd lose £80 per month. The pupil is only 12 so can't really ask them to come here.
It's just quite a lot of hassle and I end up wasting money on taxis to make it at a reasonable time

Depends where you are geographically, I pay £25 an hour for DSs Tutor but I have to transport him there and back, he (the tutor) charges more if it's a home visit. You could do a few searches and find out what Local Tutors charge and look at charging similar.

Or look at this differently. Advertise your tutoring at £25 per hour at your own house, if you can easily replace the hours then let the family know that its £20 for zoom or £30 to go to their house.

My son tutors part time to top up his income while doing a PhD and he does it all online. I think it's quite common post Covid for it to be done this way and he certainly hasn't had a problem finding clients.

Also, thinking about it, we had tutors for both my DC when they were doing GCSEs/A Levels and we always took them to the tutor, they never came to us.

It doesn’t sound worth it. I’ve finally learnt that I can pick and choose what tuition I do, and if a potential pupil lives too far for me to get to, they either come to me or I say sorry but no. I do some tuition on zoom too which is great.

I don’t charge a lot for my tuition but my time travelling etc is important too!

You're not making £80 a month, though.

Three hours travel time a day.
£5 a week (or a trip?) for the Uber.

Not worth it. I'd be charging at least £40 or not bothering.

I agree with folks.
Offer Zoom or discontinue lessons.

Doesn’t really matter what the mum would like to pay. You set you rates and terms there’s no need for negotiation!

Our tutor charged £30, plus £5 travel. I think you could at least ask for an additional £5 travel charge, explain the situation?

No it's not worth it by any stretch of the imagination. tbh ad hoc tutoring especially at mates rates never is - I got asked to tutor by parents of my children's classmates/ sports team mates a lot years ago and did it for a while but it was never worth it. Friends of friends / neighbours of acquaintances type people always expect the earth for a discount price and you end up doing hardly more than breaking even and somehow the parents convince themselves that they're the ones doing you a favour/ paying for a service and therefore entitled to expect complete flexibility and constant availability and to pay when it suits them...

Tutoring is only worth doing completely professionally having researched the going rate and using a proper contract with a fairly inflexible cancellation policy etc.

That's really low. Say you need to increase and add travel costs on top or continue same rate via zoom

You need to tell her that you are spending two hours travelling to a one hour lesson, which is not viable for you. Either switch to an online lesson, teach it at a location half way, or raise the cost of your lesson. Entirely reasonable given rising living costs. Value your time, OP. It’s worth more than £6.66 an hour, right? £20 an hour is very inexpensive for a tutor so she’s the only winner here.