Truckstop Travels

Eddie’s Travel Center in Mascoutah, Illinois, has taken promotions to a new level. They do a phenomenal job of promoting products through their day-to-day marketing and also take advantage of seasonal opportunities. Even better, they’re focused on marketing the same message throughout the location. They start their promotions on the outside of the location and carry it through to the inside.

When you walk through the front door of the Coffee Cup Fuel Stop location in Vermillion, South Dakota, what strikes you is the customer service. As soon as you enter, you can feel how they have taken ordinary and made it extraordinary.

The prolonged rainfall and resulting flooding in Louisiana in August was absolutely devastating. During a recent visit there in August, I saw so many truckstop and travel plaza operators doing everything they could to remain open during the disaster to serve their customers. We also talked with members who had to close due to the floods but were hard at work in hopes of re-opening as soon as possible. Our industry keeps people and products moving, and that can be even more important as people are leaving devastated areas or working to bring in relief supplies.

During our travels to independent operators, Lisa Mullings, NATSO’s CEO, and I were fortunate to spend a couple of quality days with Sapp Bros. If we are noticing a trend in most of the locations we visit, including those travel center locations in Chile where NATSO travel center members enjoyed firsthand insight into COPEC’s operational excellence, rest rooms are king, and Sapp Bros. does not disappoint, specifically in Nebraska City.

NATSO Chairman Tom Heinz is fond of saying, “It is the ordinary things done extraordinarily well.” If you were to use any phrase to describe COPEC, a Chilean energy company with a chain of fueling stations throughout Chile, that is it. During our most recent international study tour, we were treated to an amazing inside look at the premier fuel, food and retail operator in Chile, and I am not be exaggerating when I say it is one of the best in the world. NATSO and NATSO members had an awareness that topped anything that most of us have experienced recently.