I felt like 2914 was pretty loosey-goosey this year, but it is much easier to do that when you travel with only 9 students and 5 adults. Other teams I've been on have traveled with 30+ students and have had a much more formal trip process, assigning groups of students to a specific chaperone with designated check in times.
We plan a schedule before we leave, but also have daily meetings to remind everyone of the schedule, as well as to have status updates of everything that is going on. Typically, we can get a meeting room at a hotel with our room block for an hour or two Thursday and Friday night.
For students traveling to and from the event, our team is pretty lax. As a DC public school, all our students take public transportation to and from school and the teachers are comfortable with the students going out to get food in pairs, they just check in at the pit before they go. In the morning, we had two groups, the pit team and everyone else. Pit met in the hotel lobby and left as a group to arrive in time for the pit opening, everyone else was typically 30 minutes later. At CMP, we pre-ordered food and then had a team lunch behind the pits, where the crates were stored. Knowing food is going to be provided is a very strong carrot to get people to show up at a place and time.
For travel, every student was responsible to show up at the DC regional, it is on Metro and we didn't see a reason for the kids to travel to the school and then to the event. For VCU and CMP this year, we met at the school and took a charter bus to the event. We made sure we had phone numbers for everyone and the proper and separate count of students and adults, made a count before leaving any rest stop.
NEMO also has a short whitepaper with travel tips! You can find it here:
http://www.firstnemo.org/resources.htm
Wetzel