Field notes › Rostering
Tracking flights and accommodation for FIFO crews
For a FIFO crew, the roster is only half the logistics. The other half is getting each worker to site and giving them a bed while they are there. A perfectly rostered swing with no flight booked is not a rostered swing, it is a gap you have not discovered yet. Yet in most labour hire firms, the roster and the travel that makes it real are managed in different places by different people, and that gap between them is where the expensive mistakes live.
The three-file problem
The typical setup looks like this. The roster lives in a spreadsheet. Flight bookings live in an inbox and a travel agent's confirmation emails. Camp rooms live in another spreadsheet, or in the client's camp management system, or in a phone relationship with the village office. Three sources of truth, none of which update the others.
It holds together while nothing changes. Then a swing moves by two days, and the roster gets updated, and the flights do not, or the flights get changed and the room booking does not. Nobody decided to strand a worker in a regional airport or send someone to a camp with no room. The three files just stopped agreeing, and no one was looking at all three at once.
Put travel on the shift itself
The structural fix is to stop tracking travel separately from the work it belongs to. In Mustr, flights and accommodation are tracked on the shift itself. The swing, the flights that bookend it and the room that covers it are one record, not three entries in three systems joined by memory.
That changes what a coordinator sees. Looking at the roster answers the travel question at the same time: this worker's swing starts Tuesday, and the flight and room sit right there on the booking. And when the swing moves, the travel that hangs off it is on the same record you are already editing, not in a file someone has to remember exists. The rostering page shows how shifts carry this detail.
Share the load with the client
On plenty of contracts, the labour hire firm does not book everything. The client's site handles camp rooms, or the client books flights on their own account, and the firm just needs to know it is done. That split is fine. The problem is when the only record of who-does-what is an understanding between two people who set it up years ago.
In the Mustr client portal, each client site can tick off flights and accommodation on the shifts themselves. Whoever books the room marks it done, on the shift, where the office can see it. What is outstanding stops being a question you ask by phone and becomes something either side can read off the roster. The client sees only their own site's roster, and they can invite their own site users, so the person at the village office who actually allocates rooms can be the person ticking the box.
Changeover day, the stress test
If travel tracking is going to fail, it fails on changeover day, when one panel flies out and the next flies in. For a day or so, both crews exist at once, demand for seats and rooms doubles, and any disagreement between roster and travel gets exposed in the worst possible place, an airport. This is also the day most likely to have late changes, a delayed flight or a swapped worker, which the three-file setup handles worst.
With travel on the shift and every site on one timeline, changeover stops being a reconciliation exercise. The coordinator can see both panels, their flights and their rooms in one view, and a late swap is edited on the record that already carries the travel detail.
If your FIFO travel currently lives in an inbox, a spreadsheet and someone's memory of who books what, see it on your own roster.