Locum Travel Tips
Whether you’re directly contracting with a hospital and responsible for your own travel or working with a locum agency, always remember to plan ahead. It is easy to miss a key date or time error on your travel plans so give yourself an advantage by reviewing these critical travel tips before hitting the road:
Download airline apps, movies, shows, YouTubes, audiobooks/kindle/etc to keep you entertained on a long flight.
Make sure your known traveler number (KTN) has been used when booking your flight - this ensures precheck shows up on your boarding pass. This might seem like a trivial step, but I did have an instance where I was taking a flight out of a very small town to another very small town, and when I showed up at the airport the security line was out the door. I looked down at my ticket and realized that my NKT wasn’t used during booking which would have allowed me to use my TSA pre-check to cut the huge line. Luckily, I was able to run to the counter and have the customer service agent add my KTN, thereby getting me TSA pre-check, allowing me access to the shorter security line and eventually make my flight with only a few minutes to spare. There were no other flights leaving out of that airport that day! Yikes.
Check that your rewards number is on your confirmation papers for:
1) your flight, 2) your rental car, and 3) your hotel Get those points, y’all!
Request early check-in to the hotel if available.
Do not show up more than 24 hours late to your hotel check-in - they will cancel your reservation. I learned this the hard way :)
Triple check that travel dates/times allot for enough time to finish a Friday admission dump or Saturday call coverage if it is in your contract- more than once I have had flights leaving on the wrong day, wrong time, or wrong airport that would have risked me missing call coverage!
Ensure enough time to make any connections. This is obvious if you're booking your own travel; however, if you have a travel team responsible for your booking, remember they are also booking travel for dozens of other doctors so it can be easy to miscalculate a connection/time zone change.
Refuel rental car prior to return. One million times, I have forgotten to refill my rental car the morning of return and had to scramble to a gas station to refill. If your locum agency is paying your gas fees, always take a picture immediately after printing your receipt and send it for reimbursement.
Make sure the rental car has Apple CarPlay (and works) if you’re an iPhone user. We'll assume you do not know your way around the new city you will be working in, so having a secure connection to Apple Carplay or whatever navigation system you use is critical when discovering a new place and trying to get to your facility on time. Test the connections before you drive off the rental lot. More than once, I have selected a vehicle with Apple CarPlay only to find that it doesn't actually work because I didn't test it before leaving the rental agency. What a rookie!
If you have any other tips leave them in the comments below, and as always, happy travels!
