Booking a work Christmas
party in October.

October is a narrower set of choices than August, not an absence of them. The organisations that do well from here are the ones that make their decisions in a different order.

What has actually gone

A Friday or Saturday night in the second or third week of December, in the city, for eighty or more people, with exclusive use of the room. That combination is gone. It went months ago, and anyone still offering it at short notice is offering it because something fell through or because the room was never in demand.

Both of those are worth knowing about. One of them is an opportunity.

What is genuinely still available

Mid-week evenings. Tuesday and Wednesday in December are open at venues that have been full on Fridays since winter. Attendance holds up better than people expect, because a Tuesday does not compete with everyone’s family and friends the way a Friday does.

Lunches. A long December lunch is easier to staff, easier to leave, cheaper per head, and far better for conversation than a loud room at nine at night. It is also the format most organisations never consider, which is why it is still available.

Early December. The first week is quieter than the two that follow it, and the diaries are not yet saturated.

January. Not a consolation. A January event is the only one that is not competing with eleven others in the same fortnight, and people arrive rested rather than depleted. If the point of the gathering is that people are actually present for it, January is the better choice regardless of what month it is now.

What it costs

In Sydney, a venue package for a work Christmas event sits broadly between $95 and $145 a head. That is food and beverage in a private or semi-private space. It does not include styling, entertainment, gifting, printing, photography or anything that makes the night specific to the organisation hosting it.

The number moves on the day of the week, the time of day, the level of exclusivity and the length of the beverage package. The same room on a Tuesday lunch and a Friday night is not the same price, and the gap is usually larger than the gap between two different venues.

A late booking does not necessarily cost more. What it costs is options.

Decide these three things before you call anyone

This is where a late booking is either rescued or wasted. Venues can move quickly. The decisions in front of the venue are what take organisations three weeks they do not have.

• What the night is for. A thank you, a send-off, a reward, an introduction between teams that never meet, a chance for leadership to be seen and spoken to
• Who is actually in the room. Staff only, or partners. Clients, or not. Board and leadership, or not
• The real number. Not the headcount on the payroll — the number who will come, which is lower, and which the venue needs within ten per cent to hold anything

Those produce genuinely different evenings. An organisation that has not decided will get a room with food in it, which is what most end-of-year events are. One arriving with all three answers can book in a week. One still working them out will still be deciding when the last rooms go.

What does not get faster

The guest list and the seating.

A venue can be confirmed in a day. Who sits with whom cannot, and it is the part that determines whether the night does anything beyond feeding people. The seating plan is where an event either puts someone next to a person worth talking to, or leaves them with the colleague they sit beside every day of the year.

That work takes as long in October as it does in August, and it is the first thing dropped when a booking runs late. It should be the last.

The thing worth saying out loud

An event booked in a hurry still has to answer for itself in February, when someone asks what it achieved.

The compression does not remove that question. It means the thinking has to happen in a week instead of a quarter, and it has to happen before the deposit rather than after it.

The organisations that come out of a late booking well are not the ones that found a room quickly. They are the ones that decided what the night was for before they went looking.

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GD Events Group is a Sydney practice for the design of strategic experiences — corporate events, hosted environments and gifting, curated journeys and strategic experience programs. About the practice.