If you have been following my series of blogs about Corporate Christmas parties you should be well on your way to organising your best corporate event party yet, so this next instalment shows you some of my tips to get the best deals from your first choice venue.
The Busy Times:
Hotels and Venues find that Christmas can be one of the biggest opportunities to push up profitable sales for the year and know year after year this will be one of their busiest times.
You may feel that you have the perfect private booking for them with your CorporateChristmas party, but sometimes even though the offering seems great, your requirements don’t fit in with your chosen venues calendar as well as you would think.
Why?
The venues know that Thursday, Fridays and Saturdays will generate the highest demand. Those event venues with only one main banqueting room will normally hold these days for ‘joiner parties’ where there is a mixture of companies sharing the same party. This allows the venue to fill their room to its maximum capacity. Due to this strategy you would find it difficult to have the hotel commit to a private company event unless you:
– Could meet the maximum capacity
Or
– Be prepared to pay the deficit between your groups’ numbers and the maximum numbers the venue would hold at maximum capacity.
A Negative Feeling:
The latter understandably can leave you with a bit of a negative feeling, as no one likes paying for ‘nothing’ right?
A Positive Solution:
My advice in this situation is that if you want a private party on these peak days prepare to over budget for the corporate event so as to be ready for such a proposal.
You could of course look at a smaller venue with a smaller room, but from my experience once they have advertised a ‘joiner party’ for that date and have people booked on, they cannot reverse and this tends to be fairly early in the year.
A great tactic I have seen and used is to offer accommodation to your guests funded by the company if you are holding the event at a hotel. Accommodation is one of the highest profit areas for the hotels. This could get you the golden ticket to having their room on an exclusive basis, prevent you paying for ‘nothing’ and your staff feel super valued! The attraction for the hotel will be that on the ‘joiner parties’ not many people tend to stay over, the majority will get taxis at the end of the night, so for your whole group to stay it could double the hotels profit.
Another consideration is that the event venues will be quieter from Sunday through Wednesday for such parties and often advertise these as their private party nights where the minimum number of guests is often lower than that of a Thursday, Friday or Saturday and…..in my experience the event venues are in general more open to negotiation on these days. You could benefit here from:
– Reduced rates
– More package inclusions at no extra cost, such as drinks, extra course, some corporate entertainment or additional party novelties
– In some cases I have seen the event venues give away a free room for the organiser or
Your corporate event being private also gives you the advantage of having a more bespoke company event, selecting your own menu, our own corporate entertainment and event theming….All things that we can assist with here at Chordiem Limited.
So…..you are now ready to book your perfect corporate party and impress your colleagues and peers whilst getting the best value from your venue too.
If you need any further advice or would like for us to help you with your Christmas party event, then contact us on 01793 887 632 or send an email request to info@chordiem.com