Your Last Tour Was Too Long: Cut Ki­lo­me­t­res and Admin

One band, one van, two weeks, ten cities: tour routing is a lot of work, and almost all of it is invisible. Anyone who's done it knows the picture: an Excel sheet open in one window, Google Maps in another, plus an inbox full of venue replies in a dozen different formats, while you wait for that one last venue to confirm. But the problem itself is big enough: with ten cities there are over 3.6 million possible sequences. After all that Tetris you book a working tour, but not necessarily the best or shortest one. That costs time, fuel and emissions.

Managing dates and working out the route eats up hours, and even small mistakes can cost you a day. These are exactly the kind of problems a computer is good at solving — but the software was missing. After a year in beta, it's here: tourdarts reads avails straight out of your emails, manages dates and calculates the shortest bookable tour from them, in minutes instead of day, with around a third reduction in distance. Its developer, Paul Ramisch, walks you through a real tour, including the points where a human still has to make the call.

The tool is already in production at several agencies, including All Artists Agency. Last year tourdarts won the Reeperbahn Festival startup competition. Now, after more than 250 tours planned in beta, it's time to take stock and to launch!