HERE Tour Planning for festive freight
Blog|by Jamie Carruthers|17 December 2025
Too many stops, too little time? HERE Tour Planning for festive freight.
200 deliveries. 12 vans. Eight hours to do it.
We know the festive logistics puzzle well. As Christmas orders surge, dispatchers face a tough brief: orchestrate hundreds of stops across a fleet while meeting tight delivery windows and keeping overtime in check. During peak season, daily drop counts can double or triple, turning route planning into a frazzled guessing game.
Mistakes creep in. Drivers get inefficient schedules, time windows are missed, and fuel costs spike. Sound familiar? You’re not alone. HERE Tour Planning is the reinforcement you need to turn mayhem into method.
How HERE Tour Planning turns festive chaos into structured efficiency
Think of HERE Tour Planning as a supercharged autopilot for route scheduling.
You enter orders (addresses, time slots, constraints), fleet details (vehicle capacities, shift times), and rules (licensing, EV range). Hit go, and the engine computes an optimised multi‑vehicle plan that would take a human team days to build. It cross‑checks millions of route combinations in seconds to maximise driver hours and eliminate unnecessary mileage.
During the Christmas rush, this isn’t a luxury. It’s survival.
Manual planning versus smart festive delivery routing.
Manual approach: Your dispatcher sketches out zones for each driver, eyeballs the stop count, and hopes for the best. By midday, routes overlap, and drivers call in about impossible schedules.
Tour Planning approach: The software analyses every stop and assigns it to the optimal route. One driver might handle twenty-five short city drops; another takes ten spaced-out rural ones. Each route is balanced for distance and workload. Crucially, delivery time windows are strictly adhered to. If a customer needs their parcel by midday, it’s first on that van’s route, not last.
In practical terms, companies reap significant benefits. Total drive time plummets. 20% reductions are common, meaning drivers finish routes faster and with less overtime. Fuel consumption drops too (by around 10% to 15% in many cases) because the miles are optimised, no more crisscrossing or needless backtracking. And with more innovative sequencing, on-time delivery rates increase, keeping customers satisfied and reducing ‘where’s my order?’ calls for your team.
Flexible, real‑world holiday logistics optimisation
Peak season changes fast. An extra 50 orders appear, or a vehicle breaks down at 9 am. HERE Tour Planning isn’t static; re‑run or adjust plans on the fly. Lock completed stops and re‑optimise the rest after a disruption, or quickly reassign a route to a spare driver. The system can auto‑replan based on live delays, keeping your fleet adaptive. You stay in control without descending into chaos.
Ease the planner’s burden with multi‑stop routing for fleets.
Peak logistics often means your best planners are working twelve-hour days and still feeling behind. Tour Planning acts as their tireless assistant, handling the heavy computation so they can focus on exceptions and customer communication. One planner can oversee a much larger operation with such a tool. It’s also great for scenario planning. Do you need to rent an extra van tomorrow? Run the numbers in Tour Planning. It can simulate routes with and without the additional vehicle to see the impact. This eliminates gut-guessing decisions and replaces it with data-driven confidence.
Practical example: A UK courier company utilised HERE Tour Planning over the Christmas period for their Yorkshire deliveries. Instead of manually dividing routes by postcode, which often left vans overburdened or half-empty, they let the software allocate 500 deliveries among 30 vans. The algorithm identified a solution that reduced the total driving distance by approximately 150 miles compared to the previous year’s plan, resulting in an estimated fuel saving of £200 that day. Moreover, all priority 10am deliveries were made on time, whereas previously a few had always slipped. Drivers reported finishing their runs earlier, despite higher volumes. That’s the kind of efficiency boost that scales across an entire peak season.
Developer‑friendly integration: plug Tour Planning into your stack
If you build logistics solutions or run custom systems, HERE Tour Planning ships as a modern API. It integrates with transport management platforms and driver apps. Send data in; receive optimised plans back; feed them into HERE Routing or HERE WeGo Pro for execution. Non‑technical teams can use a web interface for quick wins.
As mapping specialists, we help you get this set up fast and right, from API keys to production‑ready workflows.
Ready to make peak season feel simple?
When faced with “too many stops, too little time,” let technology shoulder the load. HERE Tour Planning transforms a mountain of deliveries into a clear, efficient plan so your fleet runs at peak productivity when it matters most.
Contact our mapping specialists to see HERE Tour Planning in action. We can run a sample of your delivery data through the optimiser and show you potential savings in miles, hours and costs, no strings attached.
Make this festive season the most efficient one yet. Schedule a demo or consultation today and give your dispatchers the gift of stress-free route planning for 2026.