Get On The Bus

As event planners, when working with events, we are often dealing with transportation logistics. How many of you have organized a city-wide event with multiple hotels which required busing attendees back and forth to the convention center? I’ve personally attended events where the host provided shuttle buses from the airport to the hotel when we arrived and back again once the event was over. We also shuffle VIPs in limos, supplies from storage in U-Haul’s, and printed materials with messengers.  

My husband and I travel quite a bit for work and pleasure, both domestically and internationally. We have navigated airlines, city trains, underground trams, cross-country buses, rental cars, limos, taxis, and ride-shares. We have both coordinated logistics moving equipment and materials from breakout session recording devices and name badge printing machines to airplane engines and industrial automation robotic cells. We’ve booked flat-bed, low-belly, soft-ride, over-the-road trucks, airplanes, and cargo ships. To say we know our way around getting around is an understatement.

Which is why I was both surprised and confused by the travel arrangements we found ourselves utilizing when traveling from Salzburg to Munich on our last vacation. 

We already flew from Chicago to Frankfurt, Germany, to Vienna, Austria. After a couple of days, we then, took a 3-hour train from Vienna to Salzburg. When ready to move onto Munich, we booked what we understood to be a 45-minute train ride. 

When we arrived at the train station and looked at the board to see on which platform we would be boarding our train, on the screen were the letters “BUS.” Odd number for a rail platform. We could have a language issue here, although we can both navigate in German, but for the sake of clarity, we checked with someone nearby.

Yep. We were taking a bus from the train station for the next two hours to a bus station in Munich, not even to the train station. The rail line was under construction and the only way to accomplish our mission was the dreaded bus ride. To be fair, the bus was nice, the ride went by quickly, and we got to experience a border crossing stop and see the amazing Bavarian countryside as we rode. 

However, if this were a surprise I had sprung on my event attendees, you can guarantee I would NEVER hear the end of it. I’d have requests for refunds for weeks, in my email inbox would be a stream of dissatisfied attendee complaints, and my phone wouldn’t stop ringing to the point my mailbox would be full. Posts would show up on social media before you could say “change of plans.” Their shock would be reflected in the event’s post-event survey comments, people would be talking about it for the next couple of years, and it would take even longer for anyone to let us book their transportation again.

As I was riding on the bus, pondering the imaginary attendee’s onslaught and regretting my own initial response, my husband said the most amazing thing which completely changed my perspective. “It’s only a change order.” Of course. When executing an event, how often do we deal with the most random last-minute changes that we need to trouble-shoot? Daily? Hourly? Minutely? Secondly? When in “event mode” as I lovingly call it, do we get rattled when the room is set up wrong, the internet goes down, or we’ve run out of chicken piccata? No, we take the information we have, get creative, and solve the problem. We kick some butts, and take some names, and after a while we stop taking names…. Some people may like it and others may not, but a solution is born. 

So, get on the bus and enjoy your vacation. And, that’s just what we did.

Have you experienced a “change order” that threw you? How did you handle it?
Share it with us or send me an email.

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