Every GoWith meet begins the same way: both the booker and the Activity Partner open the app at the venue, tap Check in, and the booking timer starts the moment both pings land within 100 metres of the agreed address. It is a small ritual and does more work than it looks like. Here is the full picture.
What the check-in actually does
Three things, in this order. First, it confirms both parties are at the correct venue — not an approximate one. Second, it starts the paid clock, so the one-hour booking you paid for begins at the real start, not at the scheduled start when one of you is in traffic. Third, it locks the dispute window — if someone claims you did not show, the GPS record on both sides settles it.
The 100-metre radius, and why it is forgiving
Public venues drift. Cafes have multiple entrances, parks have no single geocoded pin, and GPS inside a mall basement is unreliable at best. The 100-metre circle is wide enough that "I am at the main gate, you are at the side gate" still counts as both of you being there. It is tight enough that you cannot check in from Starbucks when the booking venue is a park a block away.
If a venue is genuinely hard to pin — a large park, a university campus — the partner usually shares an exact meeting pin in-chat before the slot. The check-in then fires correctly from that pin.
What happens if one side is late
The timer waits. If you check in at 6:28 PM for a 6:30 PM booking and your partner arrives at 6:42, the clock starts at 6:42 and runs for the booked duration from there. The partner is paid for the full session they were present for, not punished for your 12-minute wait, and vice versa.
If a party is more than 30 minutes late with no check-in, the other party can mark the booking a no-show from the booking screen. The dispute goes to our moderation team; verified GPS tracks + chat timeline + venue pin are the record we use to decide.
What the partner cannot see
The partner sees that you have checked in and roughly where (venue-level, not street-level). They do not see where you were coming from, where you go after, your home address, or your phone's live location between bookings. Location sharing is scoped to the meet, not the account.
What breaks it
- Both parties indoors with no signal: the app lets you tap "Confirm in person" which creates a manual record — used sparingly and visible in disputes.
- Phone battery dies: the previous check-in state is already saved server-side; a dead phone does not retroactively unstart your meet.
- You are at the right venue but on the wrong floor of a tall building: the 100m radius is 3D-blind, so this still counts as "there".
- Partner starts walking during the meet: that is fine — the timer only cares about the start and end checkins, not continuous tracking.
What this unlocks for both sides
For the booker: a guarantee that you only pay for time the partner is actually present. For the partner: a guarantee that a booker cannot claim they never showed up after taking the full session. For the platform: a clean, machine-adjudicable record for the small fraction of bookings that go to dispute. It is why we built it before we built anything flashier.
If you want the full safety stack, we have a longer piece on the six layers of trust that back every GoWith meet.