trakki
Overnight or drive home? Planning multi-day trips
By Manuel Ober · · 4 min read
The question that comes up every week
If you cover a large territory, you know the moment. The last customer of the day is two hours from home, and tomorrow three more in the same area are due. Driving home means four hours of motorway for nothing. Staying means a hotel and an evening away from the family.
Usually this gets decided on gut feeling, in the afternoon, when it is already too late for a good hotel. Yet you can work it out in five minutes on the Friday before.
The sum in one line
Stay overnight if the drive home today plus the drive out tomorrow take more than two hours, and enough customers in the area are due to fill a whole second day.
Both have to be true. Two hours of driving alone is no reason if only one customer is waiting tomorrow. Five due customers are no reason either if they are half an hour from home.
Those two hours equal a whole customer visit including the drive, for every night away. On three days with two nights, you gain two visits that would otherwise be lost on the motorway.
Pick the area first, then the hotel
Book the hotel only once you know the customers, not before. Almost everyone does it the other way round.
- Look at the due customers on the map. Where do several due customers sit close together, far from home? Those are your candidates.
- Bundle two or three days. Day 1 ends where day 2 begins.
- Then book the hotel, close to the first customer of the next morning, not in the provincial capital just because you know it. Ten minutes of driving instead of forty, and the day starts with a visit.
How to get your customers onto the map is in the guide Get your Excel customer list onto a map.
What a two-day trip looks like
Day 1: Set off early. You drive the long way out only once. The furthest customers come first, then you work your way towards the hotel. The last visit may be later than usual, because there is no drive home waiting. An appointment at 17:00 is no problem on a day like this.
Day 2: The first customer is ten minutes from the hotel. From there you work your way homewards and pick up the customers along the way back. Place the last visit so that you stay out of the evening rush.
Compared with two separate days, you save two long drives. At two hours each way, that is a whole morning.
Mistakes that make a night cost more than the drive home
The hotel in the wrong place. The hotel you know in the city is 40 minutes from the first customer. Then day two starts with a drive after all, and the night has gained you very little.
Too few customers for the second day. Two visits in the morning and the drive home at eleven: you could have done the same from home.
No spare customer. If someone cancels while you are away, there is no due customer round the corner to fill the gap, as there would be at home. Keep one customer in the area in reserve that you can bring forward if needed.
The family hears about it on the same day. A night away that has been settled since Friday is a plan. One that arrives by message at 15:00 is an argument.
How often is too often?
You decide that with the people at home. The planning can only make sure that every night pays off. Someone who sleeps in a hotel twice a week and manages three customers the next day both times gets less out of it than someone who stays once and manages six.
A simple yardstick: at the end of the month, count the nights away and the visits on the days after. If the average is under four visits per night, the area was too thinly covered or the hotel was in the wrong place.
How trakki does it
In trakki you enter the overnight stay: search for the place or hotel, then set the evening you check in and the morning you check out. For the days affected, planning then starts and ends there instead of at your start address. The “Overnight stay” button sits at the top of the week view, next to “Plan again”. trakki recalculates those days straight away.
trakki calculates with road drive times and does not know about traffic jams. More in the guide Route planning in field sales and on the home page.
Frequently asked questions
From what distance from home does an overnight stay pay off?
Distance does not decide it. The drive home plus the drive out the next day does. From two hours it usually pays off, from three almost always. The condition is that enough customers are due for the second day.
Who pays for the hotel?
That is set by your employment contract, your collective agreement or your company's travel expense policy. If you are self-employed, you pay for it yourself. Employees should ask before they book.
What about three-day trips?
The principle stays the same, just with two nights. What matters is a loop: start far out and work along the way back. A three-day trip that still has three hours of driving home at the end was laid out badly.