Nikki Regan is head of commercial strategy at travel management company ATPI
Bringing major sporting events such as the football World Cup to TV screens requires an exceptional amount of organisation. Firstly there's the complex logistics of transporting a national broadcaster's crew, its equipment and the talent to where they need to be, all whilst following strict duty of care protocols.
And then on top of that there's the impact of modern implications like changing
Covid restrictions, new visa requirements, reduced flight schedules and tight accommodation
availability, which present a whole set of
complexities unique to itself.
When we are working
with a broadcaster on such an event, as we did for the Euro 2020 championships, we will often have a member of the team out on location with the broadcasting crew, managing the travel
requirements on the ground.
This is particularly pertinent during a knock-out
tournament as it’s common to not know where the next broadcasting destination
will be for certain teams until after each game. You have to be flexible and
immediately adaptable, as the result of a game dictates who moves on to the
next round and therefore where they’ll be playing next.
It makes planning
the travel and, importantly, ensuring we’re getting the best possible rates for
flights and hotel stays to stay within budget, even trickier. If you take last
summer’s Euros as an example, which featured 11 host cities across the continent, depending on the
outcome of a game, you could be organising flights to Budapest or Baku,
Seville or St. Petersburg at very short notice.
In that instance,
many broadcasters sourced local crews to help reduce the impact. But this still
meant making sure the talent was where they needed to be for presenting and
reporting on the games. We had a core group of 10 travelling and working with the
teams in-market to guarantee everything ran as smoothly as possible.
A complex landscape
For the travel
industry, the impact of the pandemic is still being heavily felt. Planning
large scale, complex itineraries for entertainment clients is made even more difficult by the lack of flight and hotel deals. There simply is not the
availability for the airlines and hotel brands to be making offers available,
particularly when the world’s broadcasting media are all descending on the same
location for the same event.
Combining that with
the rise of leisure travel means that in peak holiday periods – summer and
Christmas – flights and hotels fill up fast. These are all
considerations that must be taken into account and for which creative solutions must be found and delivered for clients while budgets remain static, at best.
On top of all that,
making sure the travel for these productions is as sustainable as possible is
becoming increasingly important. The TV and film industry has come together to promote sustainability and reduce its environmental impact with Albert accreditation. In our case, we can help broadcasting clients achieve that through our ATPI Halo Measure-Reduce-Offset methodology.
Getting a national
broadcaster to a tournament is a team effort and the same is the case for
moving them about the world. Each new challenge draws on the expertise and
experience of the travel team to come together and create a solution. In the
words of basketball hero, Michael Jordan, “Talent wins games but teamwork and
intelligence wins tournaments”.
See
also: TMC’s Olympic effort to get officials to the Games