I’m a trainer so travelling around to sites training folks on a daily basis.
Ditto. Mind you, I've been a contractor for the last 5 years, 7 before that I was working for an insurance company with company car (which I'd presume you have?)
These days, if I want the gig then I have to travel. My principal will pay for the hotel so what I do is reckon the travel time and distance and work out whether it's "worth" them paying for me to stay over. Worst case for me is Manchester which is only 56 miles away but is a pig to get into; if it's part of a longer trip then I'll often just book it if the price is roughly the same as the 112m @35ppm plus parking.
BITD my employer had a 2 hour rule as well. When I worked for operations we were allowed a bit of flexibility on that if we had a multiple night stay. Of course, if you're cipd then the rules are that you need to be in the room 1 hour prior to the start time and 1/2 hour afterwards so make sure you factor that in 😉
When all the regional trainers were moved to work for Learning and Development (!) the world kinda went to pot. The new bully / boss did some work on our working weeks and with travel, working to cipd rules and to the training plan, we were all doing 60+ hours per week.
So then they told us to stop monitoring our travel time 😉
I am mostly talking about stand-up training delivery here as well. In other words, you're active and "on show" for up to 8 hours per day. If it's more of a coaching style you're doing then I reckon it's perhaps a bit less critical.
In your situation I'd say "it depends". How much can you arrange for yourself without involvement? How much of an "us and them" approach do you want to have? I'm fortunate that I don't regard what I do as work - I enjoy it and would be willing to do pretty much whatever was needed. I'd make sure I knew the rules about this (see posts above), and be sure of the google maps times for the actual times of travel. And reckon in your actual mileage rate and overnight costs. Does your employer pay for meals etc? If you contract you're not paid for these so you find all sorts of ways of doing things cheaply.
As an aside, that boss I mentioned above once pulled up a colleague on a 3 mile difference between a journey to a venue, and the return. At 14p per mile. So £0.42. The conversation took approx 10 minutes to have between someone earning about £25 p/h and someone on about £30 p/h. And that's the problem with bean counters - sometimes you're better off working through the problem yourself and working out the ways around the issue, no matter how correct you are. I wouldn't want to be out of regular employment at the moment, even though LinkedIn tells me there are jobs around.
Does anyone actually check what you book? What does your manager say about this? Do you log your hours?
I don't know exactly where you live but you could always threaten to use public transport for your Bristol trips? With all the mesing about that entails the travel time will go way up, and the cost of daily return fares to Bristol will make a hotel look cheap.
More seriously, HSE has a Driving at Work leaflet downloadable from the web. That asks some pretty pointed questions.
Costs of traveling, be it mileage payments or miles on your lease car, surely would make a girlh look like a no brainer for the Bristol gig? Never mind the h&s and minimum wage points raised?
If it's a regular thing then it should def be part of your normal working hours. I only travel rarely and then it's usually just for one day and to a client site (and they'll be expecting me there 9am-5pm as that's what they'll have paid for). So if it's more than a couple of hours travel I'll expect my company to fund a hotel stay the night before - I don't bother trying to claim travel time back though (I would if I were expected to do it regularly though...)