What to ask a venue
before you sign.

A venue walkthrough usually runs the same way. You are shown the room empty, told what it holds, handed a menu and a per-head figure, and asked when you would like to confirm. The questions asked in that half hour tend to be about cost and capacity, because those are the questions a venue is set up to answer.

The problems that surface on the night are almost never about cost or capacity. They are about sound, light, flow and timing, and they are all knowable in advance if somebody asks.

Sound

Ask what else is running that night, and where. Function rooms are often separated by a folding wall, and a twenty-first birthday next door will finish your speeches for you. Ask what the house music system can actually do, whether volume is controlled by you or by the venue, and who holds that control at 9pm when nobody can hear each other.

Ask about the ceiling and the floor. A hard floor, a low hard ceiling and no soft furnishing produce a room where forty people sound like two hundred. It is the single most common reason guests leave early, and it is very difficult to fix once everyone has arrived.

Light

Ask whether the lights dim, and in zones or all at once. A room lit evenly at full brightness reads as a conference at any hour. Ask whether the dimmers are on a wall switch or a control panel someone has to be found to operate.

Ask where the natural light falls at the hour your guests arrive. A western window at 6pm in December will put the sun directly into the eyes of anyone seated on one side of the room.

• Can the lights be dimmed, and in which zones
• Who operates them, and are they on site all evening
• Where does the afternoon sun fall at the arrival hour
• Is open flame permitted, and if not, what is the alternative
• Can the ceiling fans be turned off or run low

Flow

Ask to walk the path your guests will walk, from where they will park to where they will stand with a drink. Count the doors. Count the steps. Note where it narrows.

Ask where the bar sits in relation to the entrance. A bar immediately inside the door creates a queue in the arrival space, and the first shared experience of the evening becomes waiting. Ask where people will put a coat, a bag and an umbrella, because if there is nowhere, they will hold all three while trying to shake hands.

Timing

Ask what time you can get in. Access from 4pm for a 6pm start sounds generous until you learn the room is being used until 3.30pm and the staff need forty minutes to reset it.

Ask what time you must be out, who is responsible for the pack down, and what happens if it runs over. Ask when final numbers are due, and what the venue does if you confirm sixty and fifty-two arrive.

The question most worth asking

Ask what usually goes wrong in that room. A good venue manager will tell you, because they have watched it happen a dozen times and they would rather it did not happen again. The answer is often something nobody would think to ask about: the service door that slams, the lift that only takes six, the loading dock that closes at five.

None of this is exotic. It is simply a different set of questions from the ones a site inspection is built around, and asking them is the difference between a room that holds your guests and a room that merely fits them.

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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.