Venues must be within a budget

I was pleased to see in last week’s magazine that you devoted a number of features to the booming conference industry, with specific focus on the burgeoning sector of venue-finding facilities (“Site Seeing” MW October 7).

While I am sure these articles are helpful to the conferences and exhibitions industry as a whole, they were slightly biased towards the needs of blue-chip companies which have huge budgets to spend on corporate events.

Most of the venues surveyed in the “Site Seeing” report where either located out of the country (meaning more travel expenses), or catered for very upmarket companies.

Malta and the Faro Isles may offer value for money for clients with a huge event to stage, but what about the smaller companies which can’t afford to fly 30 delegates out to Kenya?

Perhaps Marketing Week should run a feature reviewing locations for corporate productions on a smaller scale.

These may not be as glamorous or impressive as some of the events pictured in your article, but they make up a significant enough proportion of the events market to warrant some attention.

Peter Elliot

Norwich

Norfolk