Get travel times

The Get travel times action retrieves route alternatives and travel times between two locations.

This is useful when you want an automation or script to look up live travel times on demand, for example to decide when to leave or to find the exact street names along a route.

This action does not support targets. In the UI, you are not prompted to choose an area, device, entity, or label. Instead, you provide the origin, destination, and route preferences.

Using this action from the user interface

If you prefer building automations and scripts visually, Home Assistant walks you through this action step by step. You pick what to target, tweak a few options, and save. No YAML knowledge required.

To get travel times from an automation or a script:

1. Go to Settings > Automations & scenes.
2. Open an existing automation or script, or select Create automation > Create new automation.
3. If you’re setting up a new automation, add a trigger in the When section. Scripts don’t need a trigger. They run when something else calls them.
4. In the Then do section, select Add action.
5. From the search box, search for and select Waze Travel Time: Get travel times.
6. Enter the Origin, Destination, and Region, then optionally set the other options.
7. Select Save.

Options in the UI

Using this action in YAML

If you work directly in YAML, or you want to know exactly what Home Assistant does under the hood, this section has the technical reference. It lists the field names you use in YAML, their types, and which ones are required.

In YAML, refer to this action as waze_travel_time.get_travel_times. Because this action returns data, use response_variable to capture the result. A basic example looks like this:

action: waze_travel_time.get_travel_times
data:
  origin: "51.330436, 3.802043"
  destination: "51.445677, 3.749929"
  region: eu
response_variable: routes

This looks up the routes and stores the result in the routes variable.

Options in YAML

Response data

The action returns a routes list. Each route includes:

• name: a short description of the route, usually a main road along the way.
• distance: the distance of the route, in the selected unit system.
• duration: the travel time of the route, in minutes.
• street_names: the list of street names along the route.

For the example above, the response looks similar to this:

routes:
  - duration: 16.15
    distance: 13.942
    name: B455 - Boelckestraße Wiesbaden
    street_names:
      - Eleonorenstraße
      - Wiesbadener Straße
      - Otto-Suhr-Ring
      - Boelckestraße
  - duration: 16.9
    distance: 15.319
    name: L3482 - Wiesbadener Landstraße Wiesbaden
    street_names:
      - Eleonorenstraße
      - Wiesbadener Landstraße
      - Kasteler Straße

Try it yourself

Ready to test this? Open Developer tools > Actions, search for this action, fill in the fields, and select Perform action. You see what happens on your actual entitiesAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service. [Learn more] without writing a line of YAML.

Still stuck?

The Home Assistant community is quick to help: join Discord for real-time chat, post on the community forum with the action you’re calling and what you expected to happen, or share on our subreddit /r/homeassistant.