Travel and Accommodation Challenges for Event Organisers.

It doesn’t really matter if your event is a music festival, comedy show or business conference managing travel and accommodation for artists and speakers is one of the biggest challenges in event organisation. Careful planning is key to avoiding the many pitfalls that may beset you in managing these aspects of your event.  

If your event only has a handful of artists the management of their travel and accommodation should be relatively straightforward. However, for a music festival with hundreds of artists the management of their travel and accommodation is key to your overall event planning. In your planning build contingencies for as many things as possible including:

Artist Accommodation.
Make sure as far as possible that any accommodation that has been booked for performing artists meets their specific requirements. In your planning process also ensure that the accommodation is not too far from your venue and that the artist can easily and quickly get to and from your venue.

Travel Disruption. 
Both artists and ticket paying customers can be affected by travel disruption, it could be weather related or traffic accidents causing road closures for example. Make sure as event organiser that you are well appraised of impending adverse weather. Keep your customers informed via social media and be prepared to move performance schedules around to cater for late arrivals of both artists and audiences. 

Whatever challenges you are faced with always be ready to immediately make a press announcement on your social media channels. State the facts and be prompt with any announcements but at all times try and put a positive angle on such news and state what remedial action you are taking.

Try and prepare for the dreaded artist ‘no show’ – the only way to avoid this is to be in constant contact with the artist and/or their manager so that you know their whereabouts and movements at all times and take action should something unfortunate happen en-route to your venue.

In your event planning make sure you check out and inspect the accommodation first hand prior to booking and check travel times between accommodation and venues. Also check before your event for anything that might affect travel around your venue like major construction and roadworks leading to road closures.

Don’t forget that for multiple accommodation bookings you can negotiate discounts on the rate card adding to your bottom line. Equally if you are organising fleets of buses to transport your ticket paying customers you should be able to get a volume discount.

If you are using an event management software solution like FestivalPro you get great functionality built in for managing artist accommodation and travel arrangements. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and the features are built from that experience. The easy to use FestivalPro platform will guide you through every aspect that you are likely to encounter in managing your accommodation and travel arrangements with the added benefit of access to records showing bookings and confirmed travel arrangements. 

Photo by Brunno Campos from Pexels

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