Inside the High-Stakes World of Touring Travel Logistics: ‘We Can’t Make Mistakes’

For every superstar artist who takes the stage at an arena or stadium show, there’s a legion of backup musicians, dancers, sound technicians, builders and other crewmembers who make that show happen. And after every performance, they all need a place to sleep.

That’s where Rob DelliBovi comes in. As the founder and CEO of RDB Hospitality, DelliBovi and his team coordinate travel logistics for major global tours by some of the world’s biggest artists, who in the past have included Miley Cyrus, Radiohead and Kaskade. (Presently “under a ton of NDAs,” DelliBovi says he’s unable to comment on current clients.)

“We’re moving, on average, 50 to 100 people to 40 cities in 60 nights,” he says. “There’s a million moving parts.”

While few fans ever consider the logistical aspects of touring operations, it’s a crucial part of the business that involves its fair share of high-stakes drama and over-the-top personalities. For RDB, 2024 has seen its highest volume of business ever, along with its most diverse collection of clients. During peak touring season, the company has as many as 40 tours on the road, with 5-10 touring during slower months.

The coordination process starts when RDB is contracted by a tour manager, the person hired by the artist to handle the logistics — flights, buses, hotel reservations, etc. — of putting a tour on the road. This tour manager presents tour dates to DelliBovi, who then gets to work with his team to hammer out the particulars.

“We arrange add-ons like bus parking that most regular travel people would never handle,” he says. “We need hotels with an underground entrance so no one sees the talent, and it all has to be seamless and not annoying for them.”

After launching the company in 2009 and doing a major expansion in 2017, RDB Hospitality now has a staff of 25 working across touring and related arms of the business, like its car service, and DelliBovi says that overall business doubled after the company added something that few other companies offer: 24-hour support. Staff in Australia field situations that arise in what’s the middle of the night in the U.S. and Europe; weekend staff ensure there’s no minute of the day when someone isn’t available to help with canceled flights or other situations.

“People can call at three in the morning or at 2 p.m. on a Saturday and the person they talk to is not going to be grumpy, they’re going to be ready to go,” he says.” Christmas at two in the morning, we’ve got someone working.”

DelliBovi and his team typically have one to three months to make arrangements after getting the tour schedule. They first coordinate transportation, determining which members of the crew will travel by bus, commercial flights and private jet, although not all famous musicians are as picky as one might think.

“I’ll have the most famous person in the world texting me directly saying, ‘I love Delta,’” says DelliBovi. “Then someone who’s not that famous, like a reality star, and I’m talking to their eighth assistant and they need a private jet.”

After transportation is scheduled, several different types of hotels in each city are booked. Crew members like bus drivers, what DelliBovi calls the “D-party,” will stay in a hotel like a Courtyard by Marriott. The stage crew and others at this level, known as “the C party,” will stay in a Hilton or somewhere commensurate. The “B party” — typically backup musicians — will stay in a more upscale hotel, while the A party, composed of the artist and their core team, will stay in a hotel like the Four Seasons or Ritz Carlton. Options across all four tiers are presented to the tour manager, who makes final decisions, with RDB then booking hundreds of rooms on a credit card provided by the tour manager.

DelliBovi says one of the trickiest elements of the job is when artists request same-day reservations if they’ve decided to take a last-minute one-off trip during off days in a tour, for example.

“People will say, ‘I’m going to Philadelphia right now, where am I staying?’ I’m like, ‘I like the Four Seasons in Philadelphia,’ so they’ll go to the Four Seasons,” he explains. “Then they’re like, ‘I think I like the Ritz better,’ so I’ll cancel the Four Seasons, and they’ll pay a $25,000 penalty for doing that. Then they’ll go to the Ritz and call and say, ‘I was wrong. It’s the Four Seasons I like,’ so we’ll cancel the Ritz and they’ll go back to the Four Seasons. It’s just part of this job.”

DelliBovi says it’s a misconception that artists get rooms for free, particularly at luxury hotels that cater to an exclusive (and rich) clientele that includes politicians, executives and other members of the elite. These hotels charge more not only because they’re luxe, but because they’re built specifically to accommodate the needs of famous people with features like private entrances, secluded restaurant tables and elevators one can enter without passing through a lobby and attracting unwanted attention.

Of course, some artists are harder to please than others.

“Punk bands are always the coolest,” says DelliBovi. “They’re always like, ‘Yeah dude, whatever.’ Most bands are much easier. The big megastars, they’re naturally more high maintenance and choosier about where they want to be.”

He recalls having lost sleep over things like whether an artist would like the types of cheeses on the cheese tray provided in their room, witnessing debauched behavior with drugs and alcohol, helping a boy band deal with 5,000 fans waiting outside their hotel and providing hotels with photos of known stalkers as a safety precaution. (“If you see any of these people anywhere near the hotel, call the police immediately,” he advises hotel security while delivering these photos.) He even uses an alias himself while traveling with clients. Among the wilder requests he’s fielded was a celebrity who asked him to find someone to give them a last-minute colonic in their hotel room.

For that one, he says, “I charged a very high fee.”

But in terms of unsavory behavior on the road, the days of trashing rooms and throwing TVs off the balcony are largely over. “It’s moved more to green juices and yoga and the health and wellness factor,” DelliBovi says. “There are more sober people on the road and more sober tour managers who are specialists in keeping talent sober, too. It’s a good thing.”

Generally, he says, A-list artists fall into two camps in terms of where they prefer to stay. Luxury travelers like a quiet hotel like the Four Seasons that’s very “buttoned up and neutral,” says DelliBovi, while lifestyle travelers want to be in the “cool, hot, fun hotel with a bar that’s always in Page Six.”

Older clients prefer luxury while younger clients choose lifestyle, although, he says, “DJs usually want the peace and quiet of a luxury hotel. DJs produce the most noise in the world for a living, so our DJ clients are always telling us that they have to have quiet.”

Meanwhile, A parties on stadium tours typically include not just the artist, but massage therapists, life coaches, pilates instructors and nutritionists, along with the inner circle of assistants, managers and boyfriends and girlfriends. For RDB, arena tours are the best type to book, given that stadium shows “are so big that they change the way a city works,” making it harder to find the necessary accommodations.

Given the logistics at play with having multiple tours on the road simultaneously, the most important part of RDB’s work is simply making sure it’s correct. The team includes one staff member whose only job is checking every single reservation 72 hours prior to ensure bus parking spaces will be ready, that the right credit cards are on file and that the overnight hotel manager will be waiting with a stack of keys so the tired crew can go straight to their rooms.

“We can’t make mistakes in this industry,” says DelliBovi. “If a superstar artist shows up to a hotel and their room is not ready, it’s over for us; we’re fired.”

Part of this process also involves preparing staff for who’s showing up. “We sometimes tell hotels, ‘This person’s difficult, just put a very hard-chinned front desk person in place that day, because they’re going to get it.’”

RDB’s concierge service will arrange reservations to an artist’s restaurant of choice in any given city, even (and especially) the ones that are hard to get into. Other facets of the company include a car service and a corporate events arm that leverages RDB’s relationships with big-name clients to book them at private corporate gigs. (“Rob already knows their routing, so I can go to my corporate client and say ‘We can walk this act in here with minimal travel because they’re already on the Eastern Seaboard, as opposed to Rio de Janeiro,” says Elana Leaf, who heads up the RDB events division.) RDB now has roughly 1,000 clients, half of them musicians and the other half made up of sports teams, comedians and more. DelliBovi estimates that his business has 25 global competitors.

DelliBovi got into this niche after running luxury hotels in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities. His job was attracting entertainment business, including music tours, to these hotels. In doing so, he got to know tour managers, and from his vantage point, “I didn’t think it was being done efficiently,” he says. “There were too many times where the travel agent wouldn’t send me the right list of names or arrival time, or didn’t tell me who was who, so we were putting an assistant in a suite and the talent in a regular room.”

He also saw a gap in the market, finding that while a lot of established acts had a travel person they’ve been working with for a long time, no one was catering to the new generation of artists.

“There were no young, fun people doing this,” he says. “We’re a young team who are out there. Most of our competitors aren’t. We’re backstage at concerts. We’re wining and dining. We’re a very sales-heavy company, so we grew this company just by networking within that community and understanding their needs.”