Mini-Project 5: A Competition Travel & Logistics Planner

Travel is the single most variable line in an FRC budget — FIRST's published median is $3,500 for district teams, $8,000 for regional teams, and $28,000 for teams outside North America. A real planner keeps an away event from blowing your season budget.

Step 1 — Per-student cost model. Create a Travel tab. Inputs in one block: # students, # mentors, # nights, # hotel rooms, cost/room/night, # vehicles, fuel or rental cost, meals/person/day, event registration (the $3,000 additional-regional fee if this is a second event). Then compute:

Lodging      = rooms * nights * cost_per_room
Meals        = (students + mentors) * (nights+1) * meals_per_day
Transport    = vehicles * fuel_or_rental
Total        = Lodging + Meals + Transport + Registration
Cost/student = Total / students

The Cost/student number is what you communicate to families and what you must avoid turning into an individual fundraising account (a tax trap covered in the Troubleshooting module — the team pays travel from general funds, not per-family quotas).

Step 2 — Rooming list. A second block assigns students to rooms with chaperone coverage. Hotels and FIRST youth-protection expectations require adult coverage; a clear rooming list printed before departure prevents lobby chaos at 11 PM.

Step 3 — The load-out checklist. The most expensive travel mistake is arriving without the robot battery charger or the laptop with deploy code. Build a Pit Pack checklist with categories: robot & spares, tools, electronics & laptops, batteries & chargers, pit display & banner, safety/PPE, paperwork (inspection checklist, medical forms), and team comfort. Make it a reusable checklist you print and physically check off as the trailer is loaded.

Step 4 — A timeline. Add an hour-by-hour Day Plan: load-out time, departure, hotel check-in, pit setup window, practice match, qualification matches, alliance selection, playoffs, tear-down, departure home. Map this against the event schedule once it is published.

Step 5 — Contingency. Add a 10% contingency line. Something always costs more — a blown tire, an extra hotel night for late playoffs, a forgotten tool bought at a hardware store. Budgeting zero contingency is how a planned $8,000 trip becomes a surprise $9,000 trip that eats your robot-parts budget.

Keep last year's actuals next to this year's estimates in adjacent columns. Over two or three seasons your estimates converge on reality, and you will be the team that never gets a budget surprise at an away event.