Transportation: Service Vs. Price In An Uber-Competitive Market (Production Live! Panel Recap)

Moderator: Brian Edwards, Executive VP Sales Ops, SGPS/ShowRig

Panelists
David Kiely, President, Roadshow Services
Doug Oliver, General Manager, Pioneer Coach
Julie Black, Director, Premier Aviation
Rich Thomson, CEO/Founder, Dreamliner Luxury Coaches LLC
Mark Larson, Head of Leasing, Beat The Street

“I always say we are deep sea fisherman,” Roadshow Services president David Kiely said. “Some of us have bigger boats, some of us have smaller boats, but during the season, we’re all out trying to catch fish.”

The business of getting tours — artists, crew, equipment and, apparently, pets — from Point A to Point B and beyond is no doubt a competitive one. The number of luxury coaches are limited, there are legal restrictions on how long drivers can drive and pilots can fly and when the summer season heats up, the asset pool gets tight. Cost quotes, the logistics leaders at April 15’s Production Live! transportation panel agreed, are, however, broadly similar among the top companies so what sets comnpanies apart is the level of service they provide, the relationships they build and the rapport between client and provider.

And the front line of those relationships is not the folks in the front office: it’s the men and women — quite literally — in the driver’s seats.

“When the tour gets out on the road, it’s all about the driver to operate safely,” Beat The Street’s head of leasing Mark Larson said. “The driver needs to be a safe and smooth driver and keep the bus clean and most importantly, get along with the people on his or her bus. A lot of it is personality and being pliable. Unlike trucks, on buses, the load talks back.”

For aviation, finding the right on-the-road (or in-the-air) managers can be more challenging. A charter company, by necessity, is working with different crews, different fixed-base operators and different planes in a variety of locations and doesn’t have the same mile-by-mile stability as the over-the-road crowd.

Julie Black, director of Premier Aviation, says her company has to “brief well” to build rapport with those crews who can themselves build a relationship with the touring party. It’s worked so well, she’s had tour clients ask for the same pilots and flight attendants on subsequent trips.

A critical part of the service component is experience and knowing what works – and what won’t.

Dreamliner founder and CEO Rich Thomson tells an illustrative story from two of the biggest tours of all-time.

“Taylor Swift’s dad was at my office wondering even if buses made sense [for ‘Eras’] and ultimately it didn’t,” he said. “On the other side of the spectrum is the Beyoncé tour, which was 27 buses, and it was routed so that buses made sense.”

“Not all tours have the luxury to route like Beyoncé did so what it boils down to is experience,” Kiely added. “You have new carriers come in and say ‘we can do this at this price’ and smaller bands may gravitate to that but they are opening themselves up to exposure.”

And ultimately, that’s why service wins over cost. As Black — who said she’d met with promoters with “dot-board routing that made no sense” — puts it: in logistics, you have to “de-risk” in advance, even though inevitably, there will be an equipment breakdown or a weather problem or a traffic hiccup.

“We want to win on service.” Oliver said, “and we have long relationships and people know how we react when things go wrong – and they will go wrong.”