I'M AN ACTUAL TOUR MANAGER Post 2: Travel

Travel
As a TM, you are responsible for arranging and overseeing travel for everyone on the tour. Some TMs use travel agents to book travel; I do everything myself because I enjoy puzzles, and that’s what booking travel can be sometimes. When I say travel, I mean flights, rental cars, Ubers, shuttles—everything. You have to oversee all of it, and it can be daunting if you’re not organized.

Tour Buses
For this example, we’re still on a mid-level tour in a bus.
A very important part of traveling by bus is the number of hours a bus driver is allowed to drive before they have to take a break. A bus driver isn’t legally allowed to drive more than 10 hours before taking an 8-hour break. Any drive longer than 10 hours is called an overdrive, and it requires you to have more than one driver so they can switch off during the long drive. For the most part, drives won’t be over 10 hours, but it does happen occasionally.
Here’s an example of a typical day in the middle of a tour:
In advance, you’ve arranged for the tour bus to park at the venue and hook up shore power at 6 a.m. The driver has been driving since a 2 a.m. bus call, but their hotel room isn’t ready, so they do some maintenance on the bus or hang out until everyone wakes up. The venue production manager opens the load-in door for the 12 p.m. venue access that you’ve also arranged in the advance. Everyone goes inside to use the restroom, and you arrange for a runner or an Uber to pick up your driver and take them to their hotel for the rest of the day. The venue you’re playing needs your bus gone by 1 a.m. for another bus to park, but the next venue is 3 hours away, and you can’t park there until 9 a.m.
You do the show, arrange for the runner or an Uber to pick your driver up from their hotel at 12:30 a.m., and make sure everyone is on the bus for a 1 a.m. bus call. When everyone is on the bus and you’re ready to start driving, you go to the bus driver and say, “We’re a bus.” This means it’s okay to leave wherever we are. So, it’s 1 a.m.; if you go straight to the venue, you’ll be 5 hours early with no place to park the bus. What do you do? You ask the bus driver to park in a parking lot 30 minutes away from the venue and wait for 5 hours. If you’ve ever seen a tour bus parked in a random Walmart parking lot, this is what they’re doing. At 8:30 a.m., you make sure everyone is on the bus, tell your driver, “We’re a bus,” and you drive to the venue to park for the day. At this point, your driver has been on the clock for 8 hours, and it’s 9 a.m., so hotel check-in is still far away. If you don’t have a high status with a hotel chain just yet, you call the hotel, sweet-talk the front desk person, and beg them to let your driver in early. If that doesn’t work, you have to pay for early check-in for your driver’s room, which is an added expense you have to keep track of.
Preparing for and advancing bus moves and parking—all while keeping the drivers’ hours in mind—is basically a full-time job. Having these things planned out in advance will help you tremendously during the actual tour. Overdrives and early check-in/out fees will add up quickly and are just frustrating, so plan the tour’s routing with this in mind.

Fly Dates
There is a version of touring called fly dates that doesn’t involve a bus at all; rather, everyone flies from where they live to a show, does the show, and then flies home. These are my personal favorites, but they do require some serious planning and communication. If everyone is flying in from different cities, you have to plan their arrivals at the same airport as close to the same time as possible. If you’re renting SUVs or vans, you, the TM, should arrive before everyone else to pick up the vehicle so the artist doesn’t have to wait when they arrive. If you’re playing a festival, sometimes the festival will offer a shuttle to and from the airport and hotel. You will cover the pick-up and drop-off times with the festival in your advance. The goal here is to make sure your artist is waiting as little as possible and that everyone has the shuttle driver’s info as a contingency if any of the flights get delayed.

Flights
There are a million ways flights can fuck you up: delays, cancellations, lost baggage; you spell someone’s last name incorrectly, and the airline won’t let them check in (I did this). Really, there are just a few tips I can give you here that might save you some headaches.

1. Make a spreadsheet with everyone’s info: first, middle, and last name; birthday; home airport; seat preference; TSA PreCheck number; passport number with expiration date and issuing country; email address; phone number; and all airline frequent flyer numbers. Ask them once and keep that spreadsheet in your Google Drive, accessible at all times. Copy and paste when booking to make sure you get it right the first time.
2. If you’re flying folks to a city and their first stop is a hotel, make sure they aren’t arriving at the hotel at, like, 9 a.m. Hotel check-ins are usually later in the day, and no one wants to sit around waiting for their hotel room to be ready after flying.
3. Put AirTags in everything: your suitcase, your pelican case, your backpack, guitar cases—everything. I can’t count the times an AirTag has saved me in a lost baggage situation. It’s an inexpensive investment that will pay for itself the first time you need to use it.

Ubers
If you’re in a travel situation where people need Ubers frequently, you can create an Uber business account using your artist’s credit card. You then authorize each person to bill directly to the account. This is super helpful with receipts when you get to your road report and accounting.

I can’t stress this enough: each tour is different, and each artist is different. It all depends on how they prefer to travel, the kind of shows they’re playing, and what the tour’s budget allows. Travel days can be long for a TM, but when you pick an artist up at the airport right when they land in a comfy rental with a cold bottle of water and a snack or whatever they like, you show them that: 1. you know how to plan ahead, 2. you care about their comfort, and 3. their time is important to you. These are essential points to pay attention to when booking travel.