  This paper studies the Multi-period Travelling Politician Problem whose
objective is to maximise the net benefit accrued by a party leader during a
fixed campaign period. The problem is also characterised by flexible depots
since the daily tours realised by the party leader may not start and end at the
same city. A hybrid multi-start Iterated Local Search method complemented with
a Variable Neighbourhood Descent is developed to solve the problem
heuristically. Two constructive procedures are devised to generate initial
feasible solutions. The proposed method is tested on 45 problem instances
involving 81 cities and 12 towns in Turkey. Computational results show that the
hybrid metaheuristic approach outperforms a recently proposed two-phase
matheuristic by producing 7 optimal solutions and 17 new best solutions. In
addition, interesting practical insights are provided using scenario analysis
that could assist campaign planners in their strategic decisions.
