From the initial contact over the negotiations, contracts and riders and finally to travel logistics and management, the "how to get everyone from A to B (sometimes continuing to C etc)" was always an exciting and creative challenge. DJ shows/tours were fairly easy and the emphasise was more on overseeing the entire tour process to ensure enough time for local transport, social activities, any kind of potential delays, extra adventures etc. but when it came to the full show itineraries, that was usually a conglomerate of variables, with the promoters slow deposit payments being the main worry, as well as the limited options of transport that would tick off all the boxes:

a) doesn't charge by KG

b) allows transport of batteries, confetti guns and other "dodgy looking" equipment

c) is a direct flight or has a stopover of over 3 hours (so to minimise lost luggage chances)

d) brings everyone to roughly the same city in roughly the same day

e) local transport is available  

f) as cheap as only possible
 

It involved researching alternative paths of oversized luggage transportation, navigating through the web of customer supports and airline policies, finding loopholes or even digging up airline policies regarding delays, natural disaster and refunds, as more often than not seemingly hopeless situations were saveable with the right knowledge and approach.

Monitoring arrivals and local transport, rescheduling and rerouting stuck team members, remotely handling flight cancellations and delays, extra requests and needs, last second sourcing of broken equipment or making sure the local pickups went as agreed (which was a little bit of a wild west in some parts of the world), one was on call and in action pretty much the entire time of the engagement/tour.

You grow up as a kid looking up at all these big institutions, and systems. The great responsible and wise adults. You believe the world is "sorted out" and functional ... until: your luggage gets lost. 

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And suddenly, just like that, these preconceptions turn into misconceptions and while you are being forwarded from outsourced calling center to outsourced calling center, chasing in circles while airlines blame shift and evade as if it was a national sport, you eventually - at 3 am - gain information that your "lost"luggage has made a more extensive travel trip than the average family in a year. (Italy to London to the Netherlands to USA - LA to USA - SF and back. Im not joking!)

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That being said, travel logistics are a very exciting things for an over-thinker. To the degree where others might go death-scrolling through social media, you find yourself on flightconnections.com, setting up hypothetical flight itineraries and hunting for that incredibly cheap and direct flight fare (eg. UK - Australia - Japan - UK for 800EUR incl. luggage! We used that gem of a price on our 2018 December tour).

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But travel logistics are not always that smooth. If you have 18 people from 8 different countries - yet I enjoyed such challenges. The only issue was, that usually the deposits for the flights kept being delayed, which in turn put the entire project in jeopardy as sometimes there was exactly one flight combination that would safely bring everyone to the location in time without spending 5 figure amounts on just the luggage (airlines charging by KG, or having different luggage dimensions and limitations, prohibitions and whatnot), and then it was a daily persuasion and liaising game, as often responsibility and farsightedness weren't written with big in this industry niche. 

So it remained a delicate balance between enforcing the contract, ensuring the event would happen, and still being booked again next year or recommended to other promoters. Unfortunately, there are A LOT of foul players in this business, an open secret as well as seemingly necessary evil. It took good two years to convince my own artist to start using proper contracts despite the obvious benefits, especially with bigger shows where more is at stake (no-brainer for me) but the world is very big and very strange sometimes.

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Do you know the game of cabbage, rabbit and fox? 

We had our own version - 2 arrival airports, 8 people (with and without driver's license) from 2 departing airports, 1 rental car at one airport, 1 rental van at another airport, and over 300kg of oddly shaped luggage to land and drive to the neighbouring country all on a delayed super thin shoestring budget because *Michael Scott voice* Parkour! That was the early days when I was still just delegated the crisis management tasks ...