Young Gun Tour Manager’s Lessons from the Road: The Flawless Smile Tour #2 Resources

Since I also want to share information beyond my own experiences (and keep my posts clean enough), I’ll post separately some resources related to my touring blog posts. These resource posts are directly linked to the equivalent touring posts so you can always revert back to them if you don’t remember what I’m talking about – here’s the original post.

Here are some resources I think both music business students and professionals might find interesting and beneficial related to transportation and moving people:

1. We compared quite many van rental companies to find the one that fit our needs and budget. Most of the companies couldn’t remove seat rows so that we could have fit the gear in. We had State Van Rental, Bandago Van Rental, and Greenvans in the final comparison and ended up with the first one. They didn’t offer 24-hour road assistance but we were fortunate enough not to have any major incidents during the tour. However, one of the band members had an AAA membership, which offered 24-hour road assistance, in case we would have needed it.
2. I kept the tour itinerary as a master file on Google Docs so that I could access and adjust it easily on both my laptop and phone anytime I needed. It included all the information about the routing, scheduling, advancing, addresses, contact information, accommodation, etc. I could have used tools like Master Tour or Artist Growth mentioned in my last resource post but decided to use a free option that was familiar to me.
3. Google Maps was our best friend on the tour. It showed us the routes, how to avoid tolls, find gas stations, shops, hotels, and venues of course. The Finnish and Brazilian speaking versions of Google Maps caused some amusement within the team. 
4. When we were driving in Iowa on our way back home, the car radio started blasting tornado warnings. At that moment, based on an industry friend’s recommendation, I uploaded a weather app called RadarScope to be able to keep an eye on the tornadoes and what was going on with the weather around us. We were lucky to only encounter some heavy rain and thunder and avoided the tornadoes!

What resources have you used when moving people and gear on tour?