Roadshow Route Planning: Algorithms vs. Spreadsheets

The Hidden Cost of the Spreadsheet Roadshow

Most roadshow schedules still get built the same way they did fifteen years ago: a shared spreadsheet, a mental map of which city connects to which, and an email thread that grows to 40 replies by day three. WeConvene’s research on roadshow logistics describes this as management via “static spreadsheets, mental maps, and endless email threads”, and that phrase lands because every corporate-access coordinator has lived it.

The spreadsheet itself isn’t the problem. A spreadsheet is a grid. It holds data well and does nothing else. It can’t tell you that swapping meeting six and meeting nine saves 40 minutes of drive time, and it definitely can’t tell you that in real time when an investor cancels at 8:45am on day two of a five-city trip. That gap between “holding information” and “acting on information” is where meetings get lost, not because the planner missed something, but because the tool was never built to catch it.

Quantify it and the cost stops being an annoyance and starts being a line item. WeConvene’s analysis found that algorithmic route planning produces an average of 1.5 extra meetings per day compared to manual planning. Across a standard five-day, two-team roadshow, that gap compounds to 15 additional investor meetings left on the table by the spreadsheet approach. Fifteen meetings is not a rounding error. It’s often the difference between a roadshow that hits its book-building targets and one that falls short.

Where Spreadsheets Break Down: The Tipping Points

Spreadsheets fail at a predictable, identifiable threshold, not gradually and not randomly. Logistics platform Elogii pegs the breaking point at roughly 10 to 20 stops, after which planning becomes manual, error-prone, and dependent on one person’s institutional knowledge of routes, contacts, and timing.

Elogii is candid that spreadsheets are “genuinely fine for a handful of stops and one planner.” That’s an important admission from a vendor in the routing space, and it’s the honest starting point for this article too. Nobody needs an algorithm to schedule six meetings in one city with one banker. The tipping point arrives when specific complexity factors stack on top of each other, and roadshows hit nearly all of them at once:

• Stop count exceeds 15-20, the threshold where sequencing errors and drive-time miscalculations start compounding.
• Multiple teams or “depots”, two management teams running parallel tracks across cities, each with its own starting point and hotel base.
• Time windows and SLAs, institutional investors who will only take a 30-minute slot between 9:00 and 9:30, non-negotiable.
• Frequent same-day changes, cancellations, reschedules, and flight delays that require re-sequencing everything downstream.
• Demand for live ETAs and status updates, teams and hosts who need to know in real time whether a meeting is running late.

Map those five triggers onto a real multi-city roadshow and the overlap is almost total. Two management teams, five cities, back-to-back 30-minute investor slots, and at least one reschedule per day, that’s not an edge case, it’s the median roadshow. Elogii’s framework wasn’t written with capital markets in mind, but it describes the corporate-access calendar with uncomfortable precision.

What Algorithms Actually Do Differently

Route optimization software doesn’t just move faster than a human planner, it evaluates a different, larger set of variables continuously rather than once. According to WeConvene, algorithmic roadshow route planning sequences meetings based on geo-location, historical traffic patterns, and investor availability, and instantly recalculates the entire schedule when a cancellation or delay occurs.

“Instantly recalculates” is the operative phrase, because it names exactly what a spreadsheet cannot do. When an investor cancels at 10am, a spreadsheet just deletes a row. It doesn’t ask whether the freed-up 45 minutes should go to a waitlisted investor across town, whether the driver can now make an earlier flight connection, or whether the afternoon block needs to shift by fifteen minutes to absorb the change. A human planner has to work all of that out by hand, usually mid-roadshow, usually by phone. An optimization engine treats the cancellation as a new input and re-solves the whole route around it in seconds.

Elogii frames the specific capability gaps the same way: Excel cannot optimize sequence order, cannot enforce time windows or capacity constraints, cannot re-plan on the fly, and cannot generate live status updates. Each of those is a distinct computational task, not a formatting problem, which is why adding more tabs or conditional formatting to a spreadsheet never actually fixes it.

Mapline makes a related point worth sitting with: Excel remains genuinely useful for organizing routing data (contact lists, addresses, meeting durations), but it “is not designed to handle modern routing complexity on its own.” AI-powered optimization extends what a spreadsheet does rather than replacing the spreadsheet’s role as a data container. That distinction matters for the migration path later in this piece, you’re not throwing out your data infrastructure, you’re adding a decision layer on top of it.

The Numbers: Quantifying the Efficiency Gap

Two independent data points, from two different vendors in two different industries, converge on the same conclusion: algorithmic routing meaningfully outperforms manual planning, and the gap is measured in double digits, not marginal percentages.

Delivery-routing platform Routific states that route optimization algorithms are “much more efficient than human route planners, in a fraction of the time,” and estimates the improvement at roughly 20%, a figure Routific itself describes as conservative. That’s a logistics-industry benchmark built on last-mile delivery routing, a different domain from investor meetings, but the underlying math problem is structurally identical: sequence a set of stops with time constraints, minimize dead time, and re-solve when conditions change.

WeConvene’s roadshow-specific figure translates that general efficiency gain into a number IR and corporate-access teams can actually plan around: 1.5 extra meetings per day, 15 extra meetings across a standard five-day, two-team roadshow. Run that forward across a full-year roadshow calendar and the compounding effect is significant, more investor face time without adding travel days, without adding headcount, and without extending the roadshow itself.

The ROI case here isn’t about saving planner hours, though that’s a real secondary benefit. It’s about meeting density. A roadshow’s entire purpose is investor conversations, and the spreadsheet tax is paid in the currency that matters most: fewer conversations per trip.

The Technology Behind the Curtain

Route optimization isn’t a marketing veneer over guesswork, it’s a mature subfield of computer science with decades of peer-reviewed research behind it. ScienceDirect’s overview, citing Bast et al. (2015), categorizes route-planning algorithms into four established classes: goal-directed, separator-based, hierarchical, and bounded-hop approaches, each suited to different network structures and query demands.

Microsoft Research’s Customizable Route Planning engine is a useful proof point for skeptics. It supports arbitrary cost functions, turn costs, and real-time queries, and it can incorporate new metrics into its routing model in under a second. That’s a production system built to handle exactly the kind of shifting, multi-variable constraints that a roadshow throws at it: investor tiering, time-window priority, last-minute changes, all layered on top of geography.

Research from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, including work by Dorothea Wagner and collaborators, describes precomputed overlay graphs and shortcut edges (contraction hierarchies) that make queries fast enough for real-time use while still adapting to user-constrained scenarios, the kind of custom rules a corporate-access team would apply, like weighting anchor investors ahead of smaller accounts. None of this requires an IR team to understand the math. It’s worth knowing it exists, because it means the underlying engine has been stress-tested well outside the capital-markets world before it ever touched a roadshow calendar. PDMC Logistics even markets a dedicated ROADSHOW™ Route Planner product, further evidence that roadshow routing is treated industry-wide as its own specialized logistics discipline rather than a loose metaphor borrowed from delivery trucks.

From Spreadsheet to Algorithm: A Practical Migration Path

Nobody needs to delete their spreadsheets on day one. Mapline’s guidance on scaling past manual routing is instructive here: a multi-stop route planner automates sequencing, balancing, and geographic optimization that spreadsheets can’t handle, building high-performing routes “in minutes” instead of “wrestling with cells and formulas.” The spreadsheet doesn’t disappear so much as it gets demoted from decision engine to data source.

A workable hybrid path looks like this: keep the spreadsheet as your source of truth for investor contact details, tiering, historical meeting notes, and internal approvals, the static reference data that doesn’t change hour to hour. Route the dynamic layer, sequencing, time-window enforcement, re-optimization on cancellation, live status to the field team, through a system built to recalculate automatically. That split respects the real strength of spreadsheets (they’re excellent, flexible databases) while removing the part of the job spreadsheets were never built to do (real-time, multi-constraint optimization).

Run the self-check below before your next multi-city trip. If you check three or more, you’ve likely crossed Elogii’s tipping point already:

• More than 15 stops across the roadshow
• Two or more management teams or starting locations in play
• Hard investor time windows that can’t slip
• At least one same-day change on a typical roadshow day
• Team members asking “where are we right now?” mid-day

What This Means for Your Next Roadshow

The “Book Better” case isn’t about shaving hours off planning, even though that happens too. It’s about what those recovered hours and recovered slots convert into: more investor conversations per trip, tighter meeting density, and a roadshow that responds to a 9am cancellation without losing the rest of the day. Fifteen additional meetings across a five-day, two-team roadshow isn’t a productivity statistic. It’s fifteen more chances for a management team to make its case directly to capital.

The teams still running roadshows purely on spreadsheets aren’t making a mistake; they’re running into a structural limit that no amount of careful formatting fixes. The fix isn’t more discipline. It’s a different tool for the part of the job that was never a spreadsheet task to begin with.