The Fundamental Issue
Travel and living is infrastructure. When infrastructure works, it’s invisible. When it fails, it cascades across everything else and becomes extraordinarily expensive to fix in the moment. Productions need to approach it with the same rigor as camera, lighting, and sound – because poor travel/living management absolutely affects what ends up on screen, even if indirectly. Here are the problems, risks, and points of failure that productions need to consider for travel and living:
Financial Risks & Hidden Costs
• Budget allocation and cost optimization – Productions spend 8-10% of physical production budget on travel and living. Are your paying the lowest rate for the product and service over my dates? Are there alternatives that will deliver similar results at a lower cost? How can you make sure you are getting the best deal?
• Labor cost efficiency – Each hour spent on busy work costs $50-60/hr in wages and fringes. Are you paying for process, business results or outcomes? How can you do things more efficiently?
• Unused inventory waste – Block-booked rooms/cars that go unused when schedule compresses. Are you eating cancellation penalties or just paying for empty rooms?
• Premium pay cascades – When travel delays cause crew to miss rest periods, you trigger overtime, double-time, meal penalties that multiply across departments.
• Emergency bookings at 3-5x normal rates – Last-minute replacements (actor quits, someone fired, emergency hire) mean paying whatever it costs.
• Tax inefficiency – Are you structuring travel and per diems to maximize tax advantages? Money left on the table is money wasted.
• Currency fluctuation exposure – International productions booking months in advance without hedging strategies. A 10% currency swing on a $2M travel budget is $200K.
• Opportunity cost of capital – Paying deposits 6-9 months in advance. That money could be working for you elsewhere or kept liquid for production needs.
• Insurance premium impacts – Your travel/housing risk profile affects production insurance costs. Poor management history = higher premiums.
Process & Systems Failures
• Fragmented search and booking – Scattered search and booking across product categories and suppliers makes the process costly, cumbersome, and introduces multiple points of potential failure. How do you consolidate and unify search and booking so it costs less, reduces hassles and reduces the number of points of failure?
• Booking chaos and production delays – Booking chaos is to be avoided at all costs because it creates the potential for production delays that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. How can you organize travel and living to reduce chaos? Are legacy systems the problem? Human incompetence? Is it a combination?
• Data fragmentation – Information scattered across email, spreadsheets, texts, booking platforms. When the coordinator quits, where is everything?
• Version control nightmares – Working off old spreadsheets, outdated flight info, superseded hotel blocks. Someone gets left at the airport.
• Communication breakdown across departments – Locations doesn’t tell transportation about the road closure. Transportation doesn’t tell housing they need a different hotel. Housing doesn’t tell accounting. No one tells the crew until they’re stranded.
• Vendor relationship degradation – Constantly squeezing vendors on price without building partnerships means when you desperately need a favor, you get none.
• Lack of institutional memory – No documentation of what worked/failed on previous productions. Every show reinvents the wheel badly.
• No escalation protocols – When something goes wrong at 2am, who has authority to make $10K decisions to solve it? Delayed decisions = bigger problems.
Schedule Flexibility & Change Management
• Cascading schedule changes – Scheduling changes driven by financial or creative considerations cascade across the entire production. Can travel & living anticipate scheduling changes without knowing what they are in advance? How will changes impact budgets (cost more for last minute changes, activate penalties in contracts, add unplanned spending)?
• Risk and flexibility balance – Risk is ever present – contract guarantees, penalties, force majeure, pissed off cast and crew, production delays. How can you reduce travel and living risk so it doesn’t create its own problems or compound others? How do scheduling changes introduce or increase travel and living risk and how do you reduce that? How do you create the maximum financial and scheduling flexibility with the least amount of risk?
Impact on What Ends Up On Screen
• The clock is always ticking – How do you make sure travel and living doesn’t hold us up? Delays in getting crew to location, transportation breakdowns, or housing issues that prevent adequate rest all eat into precious shooting time.
• Talent performance degradation – Poor sleep from inadequate hotels, jet lag mismanagement, or long commutes directly affects on-screen performance. A lead actor arriving exhausted to set shows on camera.
• Continuity issues – If hair/makeup/wardrobe can’t arrive early enough due to housing location, or if they’re exhausted, continuity suffers across shooting days.
• Health and safety incidents – Food poisoning from catering, injuries from unsafe housing, illness from poor conditions = lost shooting days and visible impact if talent appearance changes.
• Morale affecting creativity – A demoralized crew (bad housing, feeling disrespected, separation from family) delivers diminished creative work. The DP who feels undervalued might not push for that extra setup.
• Weather/location access – Wrong housing location means crew can’t reach remote locations in bad weather, or arrive too late for magic hour shots.
Duty of Care & Legal Exposure
• Inadequate duty of care – Productions have legal obligations for crew safety and wellbeing. Poor housing in unsafe areas, inadequate transportation security, ignoring health risks = lawsuits.
• Labor law violations – Not providing adequate rest periods between travel and call times. Working crew beyond legal limits because of travel time.
• Discrimination issues – Unequal treatment in housing quality/location between above-line and below-line, or between departments, can create hostile work environment claims.
• Accessibility failures – Not accommodating crew/cast with disabilities in housing, transportation, or travel arrangements.
• Privacy and security breaches – Talent locations leaked, crew personal information exposed, security inadequate for high-profile cast.
• Environmental liability – Are you complying with green production mandates? Some jurisdictions/studios now require environmental reporting on travel carbon footprint.
Unplannable & Force Majeure
• Accommodation catastrophe – Hotel catches fire, gets condemned, goes bankrupt, double-books during your production.
• Transportation infrastructure failure – Airport shuts down, roads collapse, trains strike. Your entire cast is stuck 3,000 miles away.
• Pandemic/health emergencies – We all learned this one. Quarantine requirements, travel bans, health protocols changing daily.
• Political instability – Shooting internationally and the government changes, permits revoked, safety compromised.
• Natural disasters – Hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, wildfires affecting travel routes or housing.
• Vendor bankruptcy – Your travel management company or main hotel chain files Chapter 11 mid-production.
• Cybersecurity incidents – Booking systems hacked, payment information stolen, travel documents compromised.
Human Factors & Relationship Management
• VIP expectation management – Stars who demand changes, upgrades, specific accommodations. Where’s the line between reasonable and production-breaking?
• Per diem fraud – People gaming the system, submitting false receipts. What’s your audit process?
• Crew family emergencies – Need to get someone home immediately. Do you have protocols and budget flex for emergency travel?
• Mental health crises – Long shoots away from home, isolation, relationship stress. Travel/housing affects mental health which affects performance and safety.
• Relationship conflicts – Roommate conflicts, harassment issues in shared housing, romantic entanglements affecting housing assignments.
• Cultural insensitivity – International productions where local customs around housing, food, transportation aren’t respected. Creates friction with local crew and fixers.
Competitive & Strategic Considerations
• Market rate knowledge – Are you budgeting 2019 rates in a 2026 market? Are you aware of seasonal pricing, local events, competition for inventory?
• Vendor lock-in risks – Over-reliance on single suppliers. When they know you can’t easily switch, they have pricing power.
• Local crew/talent recruitment – If your travel/housing package is worse than competing productions, you lose the bidding war for the best local crew.
• Reputation damage – Word spreads fast. If you treat people badly on housing/travel, your next production struggles to hire.
Operational Complexity
• Multi-location coordination – Shooting in 5 cities across 3 countries. Synchronizing travel, housing, equipment, and crew movements is exponentially complex.
• Phased crew deployment – Scouts, pre-production, principal photography, second unit, VFX, wrap. Different groups arriving/departing on different schedules.
• International tax and immigration – Work permits, carnets for equipment, tax treaties, immigration compliance. Screw this up and your crew/equipment is stuck at customs.
• Equipment vs. people logistics – Sometimes it’s cheaper to fly equipment and hire local crew. Sometimes vice versa. How do you model these trade-offs?
• Minors and guardians – Child actors require additional travel/housing for parents/guardians/tutors. Triple the complexity and cost.
• Animal wranglers and equipment – Specialized travel needs for working animals, handlers, and equipment.
Hidden Time Costs
• Travel time as dead time – Crew traveling can’t prep. Cast traveling can’t rehearse. How do you minimize productive time lost to travel?
• Time zone management – Shooting across time zones means dealing with jet lag, communication delays with Studio, coordination nightmares.
• Check-in/check-out friction – Time spent dealing with hotel logistics is time not spent on production. Early check-ins, late check-outs, luggage storage.
That’s a lot to think about. Do it yourself? Give it to your POC? Hire a Travel Coordiantor? Change your profession? Nah. What you need is someone who knows what they are doing to look after it all for you so you can focus on what ends up on the screen. Contact us today so you can get a good night’s sleep on location.
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