Crew travel, tracked by production
A production moves people on a schedule that changes daily: cast flown in for two shoot days, a second unit sent ahead to a location, crew travelling home at wrap. The tickets come from everywhere: your agency, the production office, a crew member's own booking on an airline's site.
TripDesk365 puts every one of those flights in a single register, coded to the production and episode, with an itinerary each person can open on their phone and an alert when a flight is cancelled before a call time.
The production code on every booking
Your travel coordinator or production accountant decides what every trip must carry, and TripDesk365 asks for it on every booking. Typical booking fields for a production are:
| Field | Kind | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Production | A list to pick from | Harbour Lights, season 2 |
| Episode or block | Text | Block 3 (episodes 5 and 6) |
| Department | A list to pick from | Camera, Art, Hair and make-up, Cast |
| PO number | Text | PO-20417 |
| Rebillable | Yes or no | Yes, when a co-producer pays for this unit |
A field can apply to every production company you look after or to one, can have a default, and can be required. A required field with no value is flagged as missing on the booking, so nobody has to chase the accounts department's list at the end of the week. Values can be corrected at any time, because a crew member moved between units is a normal Tuesday.
Fields are archived, never deleted. When season 2 wraps, its production stops appearing in the list, and last season's exports keep their column and their values.
What the export gives the cost report. The flight-by-flight CSV has one row per flight: who, from where to where, the local departure and arrival time, the cabin, the airline operating it, and your production, episode, department and PO columns. Amounts are in the booking-by-booking export instead, once a booking's price is recorded: a booking imported from elsewhere arrives without one until your agency records what it was sold for. Until then, match the export to your agency's invoices or card statement on the booking reference or PNR.
Bookings from everywhere, in one register
Nobody on a production books all of its travel in one place, so TripDesk365 does not ask you to. Bookings come in three ways:
- Upload or paste an e-ticket receipt, an airline confirmation email or a GDS screen. Smart Import reads it into a draft booking, and a person on your team checks the draft and saves it.
- Forward airline emails to your own private TripDesk365 address. Adding a client code to the address files the email under that production company.
- Attach the e-ticket PDF to the booking it belongs to, where it is stored encrypted.
A booking whose record locator or ticket number is already in TripDesk365 is refused, so the same crew flight forwarded by three people becomes one booking, not three. TripDesk365 handles flights only: hotels, cars and trains are not imported.
An itinerary each person can use on location
Location work crosses time zones, and a call sheet written in the production office's time is how people end up at the airport an hour late. Every TripDesk365 itinerary gives times in the local time of each airport, and names the airline that actually flies a codeshare, so the traveller goes to the right terminal.
- By email, to the travellers on the booking.
- As a calendar file that drops each flight into their phone's calendar.
- As a private trip link that opens without signing in. It never shows the record locator, ticket numbers or full names, so it can be forwarded to a driver or a partner, and it stops working 30 days after the last flight.
From the trip link, a crew member can ask for different dates. The request lands in your team's queue and a person decides; nobody rebooks themselves.
Who lands when, before the shoot day
The travel coordinator's question on a Sunday night is who is arriving on Monday, and whether all of them will make call. TripDesk365 answers it from the bookings themselves:
- A calendar of every departure in the month, on the local day each flight leaves, with the airline's last reported status and any open disruption.
- A traveller directory with each person's next departure and their disruption history, for the people on your team allowed to see names.
- A travel map of flights departing in the next 24 hours, in the air, or landed in the last six hours. Positions are live where flight data has them and estimated from the schedule otherwise, and the map shows which.
- A Monday digest by email of the week's departures and any open disruptions, without names.
When a flight is cancelled the night before call
TripDesk365 follows each flight on a live flight-data feed from two days before departure, and files a cancellation, a diversion or a delay of 90 minutes or more on the booking by itself. Your agency or a crew member can file one too, often sooner. Then:
- The traveller is emailed at the address on the booking, and so is the person who booked it.
- A work item opens in your operations queue, with a time it must be handled by.
- Staff with browser alerts on are told, and so are Slack, Teams or a webhook if you connected one, so the production office hears it where it already talks.
- Smart Draft can write the rebooking email from the disruption and the options your agent types in. The agent edits and sends it, and a flight in the draft that is not on the booking or in the agent's notes is flagged first.
Air travel emissions per production
Many productions are asked by a studio, broadcaster or funder to report a carbon footprint, and flights are often a large part of it. Industry calculators, such as the Green Production Guide's PEAR carbon calculator, include air travel among the sources a production reports.
TripDesk365 estimates the CO₂e of every booked flight and totals it for any period of up to 400 days. Pick your Production field in the emissions report and you get one row per production: trips, traveller trips, distance, and kilograms of CO₂e with and without the non-CO₂ effects of flying at altitude, with a CSV download.
- Trips with no production filled in are a row of their own, never left out, so the total matches the report cut any other way.
- A trip that cannot be measured, such as one through an airport our table does not know, is counted as unmeasured, never added as zero.
- The method is stated in the file: great-circle distance times the UK government's 2025 conversion factors for the flight's haul and cabin.
If your sustainability tool wants flights rather than totals, the flight-by-flight export lists every flight with its airports, cabin and production. Check the method on our flight emissions calculator.
Crew travel kick-off sheet
The week before travel starts is when a production decides how its travel will be recorded. These are the questions worth settling then, whatever software you use.
Codes to agree with the production accountant
- The production name or number that every trip is charged to, and whether second unit, reshoots and promotional travel get codes of their own.
- Episode or block codes, if the budget is tracked that way.
- Department names exactly as they appear in the budget, so the export matches it without retyping.
- Who issues PO numbers for travel, and whether one PO covers the whole production or each trip.
- Which travel a co-producer or a distributor pays for, and how those trips are marked.
What to collect from each person travelling
- Name exactly as on the passport or ID they will travel with, and date of birth.
- Mobile number and email they will actually read while working.
- Home airport, and the airports they will not fly from.
- Frequent flyer numbers. In TripDesk365: a traveller profile keeps them, so they are offered again on the next booking.
- Passport details for international travel. In TripDesk365: passport numbers are encrypted and shown only to roles that need them, with a reason recorded each time.
- Known Traveler Numbers and an emergency contact for each person. In TripDesk365:both are kept with the booking and on the traveller's profile, and offered again on their next booking. The emergency contact is shown only to roles that may read contact details.
- Any medical or access needs. Keep these in your own crew records: TripDesk365 does not store them.
Decisions about the travel itself
- Who may book for the production, and who must agree before a ticket is bought.
- Cabin rules by role or flight length, written down before the first exception is asked for.
- Who is called when a flight is cancelled out of hours, and how the call sheet is updated.
- Which equipment travels as checked baggage, and who arranges excess baggage or carnets.
- Visa and work permit needs for each country, and who is applying.
For entertainment travel agencies
If your agency books for production companies, each one is a client account in TripDesk365 with its own booking fields, its own forwarding code, and its own place in the emissions report. Your agents work one queue across all of them, and every booking sits in one register. See how TripDesk365 works for agencies.
What TripDesk365 does not do for productions
- It does not search or hold fares, so group air holds and soft holds stay with your agency or the airline.
- It does not book hotels, so room blocks and rooming lists are not in it.
- It does not arrange excess baggage, carnets, visas or work permits, or pay per diems.
- It has no 24-hour travel desk of its own, and it does not rebook anyone by itself.
What it does is keep the record: every flight, coded to the production, in front of the people who need it.
Bring one production's flights
Send us a handful of e-tickets from a current production before the demo. We will import them, code them to the production, and show you the register, the itineraries and the emissions report.