Case Study: 2 day Conference, Off-Site Dinner and Event Support, London

Case Study Summary

Our experienced team of venue finders used their venue knowledge and years of expertise to match the client to the most suitable venue for their conference and speakers’ dinner.

We were also asked to assist with event support and attended the conference on-site on day 1 to assist with registration and all logistics.

How the DeSouza Associates Team helped:

We have worked with this client for a number of years, providing both venue finding and on-site assistance.

Based on the details of this enquiry on this occasion, we conducted a thorough venue search in the requested location and sent a bespoke detailed proposal to our client with a number of venues, including some wildcard options!  One of the major challenges with this enquiry are the minimum numbers and the need to have a private space immediate outside or adjacent to the conference room for the catering and exhibitors.

We encouraged our client to do a site inspection to his short-listed venues, which he did, and in due course asked us to confirm a venue which was one of the wildcards, but he decided to confirm it mainly due to the excellent delegate rate negotiated by our venue finding team.   We reviewed the hotel’s contract for accuracy before they were sent to the client for signing and to arrange deposit payments.

As we were also involved in event support, working closely with both our client and the venue, keeping our venue contact informed of all the ongoing programme amendments, timings for the breaks, final numbers, dietary requirements etc.

On day one of the conference, the on-site events team were having some technical issues so we assisted our client in managing these, one way or another, calling upon the services of the business centre etc.

We co-ordinated all logistics on the day, liaising with both our client and the venue staff.  For example when certain sessions were overrunning, we liaised with the on-site team to delay the lunchbreak by a short while and also double checked that all food items were labelled correctly, as we had some delegates who had very specific dietary requirements.

During the first coffee break of the day, one of the exhibitors had brought along a rather large piece of equipment which was set-up immediately outside the venue and delegates were able to view this demo during the break.  We had assisted our client pre-event in liaising with the hotel to confirm that this was acceptable.

At the end of the first day, following the networking drinks reception, our client wanted to take a handful of speakers and sponsors out to dinner.  This has always been one of the facets of this 2-day conference.  We booked a restaurant which was a short taxi-ride away and managed the transfers for our client, prior to ending our on-site support.

The delegates seemed to really appreciate being at this London waterside location, which was quite unique compared to some of the previous locations that this 2-day conference was held at.

Following the event, the final invoice was reviewed by our team before it was sent to the client for payment, without our client having to review it or query any charges.

The client has asked us to assist him on his next event where he will only be requiring our event support service as the event will take place in a clients office.