trakki
Overnight or drive home? Multi-day trips
By Manuel Ober · · 5 min read
The question that comes up every week
Anyone who covers a large territory knows the moment. The last customer of the day is two hours from home, and tomorrow three more would be due, all in the same area. Driving home means four hours of motorway for nothing. Staying means a hotel, a strange bed, and not seeing the family.
The decision usually gets made on gut feeling, in the afternoon, when it is already too late to find a decent hotel. Yet it can be worked out in five minutes on the Friday before.
The calculation in one line
An overnight stay pays off when this holds:
Drive home today + drive out tomorrow > two hours, and there are enough due customers in the area to fill a whole second day.
Both halves have to be true. Two hours of driving on its own is no reason if only one customer is waiting out there tomorrow. And five due customers are no reason if they sit half an hour from home.
What those two hours are worth: one full customer visit including the drive, on every day of the trip. On a three-day trip with two nights away you gain two visits that would otherwise be lost on the motorway.
The area first, the night second
The mistake almost everyone makes is to book the hotel first and then look for customers to fit around it. The right order is the other way round.
- Look at the due customers on the map. Where are the clusters that sit far from home and close together? Those are the candidates for a multi-day trip.
- Bundle two or three days. Day 1 ends where day 2 begins. The night belongs between the last customer of today and the first of tomorrow, not in the big city because that is the one you know.
- Only then the hotel. Near the first customer of the next morning. Ten minutes of driving instead of forty. That way the day starts with a visit, not with a drive.
How to get the customer list onto a map so that you can see those clusters at all is in the guide Getting your customer list from Excel onto a map.
What a two-day trip looks like
Day 1: Leave early, do the long drive once. Furthest customers first, then work back towards the place you are staying. The last visit may sit later than usual, because there is no drive home waiting. An appointment at 5 pm is no problem on an overnight day.
Day 2: The first customer is ten minutes from the hotel. From there work towards home and pick up the customers along the way back. Put the last visit early enough that the drive home does not land in rush hour.
The difference to two separate days: two long approach drives fewer, one full morning more.
The mistakes that make a night cost more than the drive home
The hotel in the wrong place. The familiar house in town, 40 minutes from the first customer. Then day two starts with a drive after all, and the night gained nothing.
Too few customers for day two. Two visits in the morning and the drive home at eleven. Then the day would have been the same from home.
No buffer. If a customer cancels on an overnight day, the others are further away than usual. A spare customer in the area that you can pull forward belongs in every multi-day trip.
The family hears about it on the day. An overnight stay that is settled on Friday is a plan. One announced by message at 3 pm is an argument.
How often is too often?
That is not decided by the planning, it is decided by you and the people at home. What the planning can do is make sure every night away is actually worth something. Someone who sleeps in a hotel twice a week and manages three customers the next day each time gets less out of it than someone who sleeps out once and manages six.
A simple measure: at the end of the month, count the nights away and the visits on the days after them. If the average is below four, the area was too thin or the hotel was in the wrong place.
How trakki does it
In trakki you mark an overnight stay in the weekly plan, and the days before and after arrange themselves around it: day 1 ends near the hotel, day 2 starts there. The map shows the whole multi-day trip as one line, with real road times for each leg. If a customer drops out, the rest is worked out again, on the overnight day as well.
More on this in the guide Route planning in field sales and on the home page.
Frequently asked questions
From what distance does an overnight stay pay off?
It is not the distance that decides, it is the sum of the drive home and the drive out the next day. From two hours it usually pays off, from three almost always, provided there are enough customers for the second day.
Who pays for the hotel?
That is settled by your contract or your company's travel expense policy. Most field sales contracts provide for an overnight stay beyond a certain distance. What the planning can do is show that the night saved driving time.
What about three-day trips?
Same principle, two nights away. What matters is that the route is a loop: start far out, work along the way back. A three-day trip that still has three hours of driving home at the end was badly planned.