Event Suppliers
The roadmap out of lockdown has been finalised for England and is coming soon for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and we couldn't be more excited at the prospect of welcoming back events soon! But what does it all mean for your business and what steps should you be taking? Read on to find out.
Since the announcement that weddings should go ahead without restrictions from 21st June, enquiries have been coming in thick and fast to Feast It.
There are 250,000 weddings on average a year in the UK, and 70% from last year were postponed. This means there will potentially be around 500,000 weddings taking place over the next 12 months, which is a very exciting prospect! On top of that, we also expect huge numbers of corporate events and private parties to take place as people make up for lost time.
We recommend visiting the open events section of your dashboard and quoting for as many open events as possible. And keep an eye out for the improved event match emails where you’ll be notified about new events most relevant to your business. You can read more about that here.
Over the last few days, customer intent (how quickly they want to book) has doubled and lead time has halved, so we know customers aren’t going to want to drag their feet on making a booking. They know that suppliers will be in high demand and will be making decisions on who to book with more urgency than usual, so we’re expecting customers to make a decision in a matter of days, rather than months, after making their enquiry.
That means it’s more important than ever to be on the ball with responding to messages from customers, letting them know if you’re getting enquiries from elsewhere and nudging them for a reply when necessary.
There’s set to be a boom in events like never before. So while we understand there’s still some uncertainty around the roadmap, and we’ve just been through a really difficult period, thinking about how your business could responsibly take on more events is a proactive step.
Explore creating new set ups, hiring more event managers and taking on temporary summer staff. We always encourage you to only service events within your means, but if there was ever a time to think about how to scale, this is it!
Our biggest demand at the moment is for summer weddings and parties, but we expect requests for public facing events to come back slowly but surely as the large up front costs make organisers understandably more cautious.
We’ll most likely see some taking a chance and organising summer events, but most will likely fall in autumn, so we recommend you think about how your business could service this demand.