PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Routes & Dispatch

Routing Around Weekend Events: Fitting Porta Potty Deliveries Next to Weekly Service

Event season changes the shape of the week. Weddings, festivals, races, fairs, church picnics and graduation parties all want units delivered before the weekend and picked up after it. Meanwhile, every construction site and park on weekly service still needs its normal visit. The previous article, Dense Construction Clusters: Routing Portable Toilet Service Through Busy Job Sites, covered dense weekday clusters. This one covers the weekend crunch.

The Event Week Pattern

Most event work follows a pattern:

• Thursday and Friday: deliveries, sometimes many at once.
• Saturday and Sunday: service at multi-day events, emergency pump-outs, sometimes late deliveries.
• Monday: pickups, sometimes a lot of them.

The risk is that this pattern eats your weekly service routes. If the delivery truck and a pump truck are both tied up with Friday drops, the Friday service route runs late or not at all.

Protect Weekly Service First

Weekly service customers pay every week. Event customers pay once. Both matter, but the weekly customer is the one who leaves if service slips. When event season starts, look at the week strip on the dispatch board and protect the service routes first.

One common approach is to move service routes off Friday entirely during event season, so Friday is free for deliveries. Another is to keep one pump truck on service all week no matter what, and use the delivery truck and any extra trucks for events.

Build Event Delivery Routes by Weekend

On Monday or Tuesday, open the Waiting List and look at every delivery due for the coming weekend. Group them by area and by size. A festival needing a Restroom Trailer and twenty Standard units is not one route; it may be several trips. A few weddings needing two units and a hand wash station each might fit on one route.

Each job shows the unit type, quantity and unit numbers, so you can plan loads before the trucks are at the yard. Deliveries that do not fit Friday can often go Thursday, especially to venues that do not mind units arriving early.

Service During Multi-Day Events

A three-day festival needs service between days, usually early in the morning before gates open. Set those service visits as their own jobs on the right days, and put the timing in the notes so the driver knows the window. These visits do not belong on a normal service route; they are a separate run with a hard deadline.

Monday Pickups and Rental Days

Pickups after an event are where money leaks. A unit picked up Wednesday instead of Monday may fall outside the days included in the rental. Each rental tracks the delivered date, the picked-up date, the days included and a per-day rate after that, and extra days go on the invoice automatically as Extra rental days.

That is fair to you when the customer asked to keep the units longer. It is not fair to the customer when the units sat there because your truck was busy. Plan Monday pickups as a real route, and get them done when promised. Routing Rental Pickups On Time So Extra Days Bill Right covers pickup routing in more detail.

Watch the Weekend Itself

Even with good planning, weekends bring calls. A unit gets tipped at a fair. A wedding guest count doubled. A race finishes in a different park than planned. Keep one person on call with access to the dispatch board and the office map, so a weekend pump-out or extra delivery can be assigned to whichever truck is out and closest. Weekend calls answered fast are the ones event customers remember when they book next year.

It also helps to keep the weekend crew small and clear. Decide on Thursday who is working Saturday and which truck they have, so a weekend call does not start with a round of phone calls to find a driver.

Keep Event Customers Informed

Event customers are often nervous. A bride's mother does not want to wonder whether the units will arrive. The driver app sends automatic on-the-way and arrived texts, and the customer can turn on alerts like a night-before text. The office can answer questions with two-way texting from the office.

After the Season

When event season winds down, return service routes to their normal days. Look back at the weekends that ran late and ask why: too many deliveries on one day, a pickup Monday that ran into Tuesday, a festival that needed more service than planned. Write it down, because next spring will look a lot like this one.

The Scheduled List helps with that review. Because every delivery, event service and pickup was a job on a day and a truck, you can look back at the busiest weekends and see how many stops each truck carried and what they were worth. That turns a vague feeling that August was rough into a plan for next August, such as an extra delivery route on festival weekends or a rule that weddings book their pickup before their delivery is confirmed.

For how event routing fits with the rest of your planning and dispatch, see PortaPottyBossPro portable toilet route software.