Venue Finder Team

Booking venues for conferences and meetings isn't necessarily as easy a task as you might imagine. For even the most modest of meetings, there are often a number of ancillary issues to sort out before arrangements can be confirmed – what are the technical requirements for the meeting? How many people do you expect to attend? – and for larger events, such as conventions, product launches, or annual general meetings, these problems are magnified several times over. For these reasons, it can often be beneficial to engage the services of a dedicated venue finder team that can handle all of these issues, leaving you and your staff free to concentrate on the more important issues, not least the substantive content of your seminars or meetings.

There are a number of potential benefits from adopting the services of a venue finder team. Firstly, such companies and services are experienced in their work and familiar with a wide range of venues. They can help advise on the best type of venue for your needs, bearing in mind that your requirements for a series of small meetings or seminars, say, will be very different to the logistics around holding annual general meetings or conventions. PR events and product launches bring their own challenges, too, and may alter the requirements you have of a specific venue. There are other considerations, too, as we shall see, not least accommodation, and a venue finder team can also advise on suitable places to stay, and may be able to secure discounted room rates that would not be available to you if you merely phoned up a hotel to make an enquiry.

The prime consideration to bear in mind when looking for a venue for your conferences or training courses is location. This may be obvious, particularly if all the attendees or delegates are from the same place. Alternatively, you may be hosting a national or even international event; if so, it will be important to ensure that the location for your corporate event is easily accessible for all delegates by road, rail or air, depending on circumstances.

Once a general location has been established, you need to move on to choosing a specific venue. Here again, there are a number of factors that need to be borne in mind. Your requirements of a given venue will depend on the type of corporate event you are hosting and the number of people expected to attend. Clearly if you are merely holding a meeting or series of meetings with a dozen or so attendees, your needs will probably be fairly modest; a meeting room or two, catering, and perhaps technical requirements such as projectors or videoconferencing equipment. If, however, you are planning larger events, such as annual general meetings or major conventions, your requirements become more difficult for smaller venues to support.

You will need breakout rooms, banqueting facilities for large numbers of guests, a large hall for plenary sessions with appropriate and dependable IT and projection facilities to match. Depending on how many people you expect at your corporate event, it may be that only the largest and best-appointed venues are able to cater to these specialist needs.

There are also different types of venues to consider. Many companies choose to hold their team building events and seminars in ‘conventional' conference venues such as exhibition centres or large hotels, but consider for a moment the benefits of choosing an alternative venue, such as a country house a few miles outside a major city, or a sporting venue such as a racetrack. Choosing somewhere different can enliven otherwise run-of-the-mill team building events and form a superb backdrop for PR events and product launches. A specialist venue finder team will have a list of such venues in different parts of the country, and you will be pleasantly surprised at the wealth of options available to you – and often within a remarkably short distance of your offices!

The final hurdle to be cleared is finding suitable accommodation for the delegates to your corporate events and seminars. If you're holding your event at a hotel, finding rooms for attendees to stay may not be difficult – but are you and your guests getting the best possible deal from the hotel? Unlikely. Many venue finder teams have long working associations with hotel chains and are able to secure discounted room rates on block bookings that simply would not be available to you if you simply emailed them with an enquiry.

For all of these reasons, securing the services of a specialist venue finder team can be a sensible option. Many venue finder teams offer a free service; they make their money through commissions from hotels and conference centres, so it's a win-win business relationship. Take a bit of the stress out of organizing your seminars and conferences, and save money into the bargain.