Planning Ground Transport for a Multi-City Roadshow

A roadshow schedule is built backwards from the last meeting of the day and forwards from the first. Everything in between is a series of assumptions about how long it takes to cross a city — and those assumptions are where programmes come apart.

Hold the vehicle, do not release it

The single most common mistake is treating each leg as a separate booking. A car that is released after a drop-off has to be re-hailed, and the twenty minutes that costs is exactly the twenty minutes the meeting overran by. Holding the vehicle between meetings looks more expensive on the quote and is almost always cheaper on the day.

One coordinator across every city

Five cities with five local dispatchers means five versions of the schedule. One coordinator holding the whole manifest means a change in the second city is already reflected in the fourth. It also gives your organiser one number to call rather than a directory.

Build the working time into the vehicle choice

If the team needs to review materials between stops, a sedan is the wrong vehicle regardless of how senior the passengers are. An executive Sprinter with captain seating, a table and power turns two hours of transit into two hours of preparation.

Plan the failure, not just the schedule

• Identify the one meeting that, if it overruns, breaks the rest of the day — and stage a contingency vehicle for it.
• Agree in advance who decides to skip a stop: the organiser, not the chauffeur.
• Confirm the airport departure leg against the actual flight, not the itinerary the schedule was written from.
• Give every driver the whole day’s manifest, not just their leg.

None of this is expensive. It is mostly a matter of deciding it before the day rather than during it.