By: Yana Verbitskaia

If you’re starting to look for venues and plan site visits, then congratulations may be in order—it sounds like you are gearing up for an event! 

If your planning process has just begun, you likely have a shortlist of cities and venues in mind, and maybe even some offsite locations you think would be perfect for your event. If you’re further along in the process, you may have already crafted and distributed a Request for Proposals (RFP) to garner availability and pricing from your shortlist, putting you in a great position to start evaluating your options.

While you could always take a chance and select your venue(s) based on the details shared in their proposal and their websites, we highly recommend planning a site visit (even if it requires budgeting for travel) where you can see and experience everything the venue has to offer with your own five senses. 

Site visits serve as a crucial way of helping you select the most appropriate venue, while letting you better understand and design the flow of your event. Since most of your planning work will be done off-property, planning a site visit gives you time to help lay out how your event vision will come to life. Beyond the ability to walk through the space, one-on-one time with your venue representative will allow you to ask questions about the details you notice as you tour the space and get a sense of the venue’s unique offerings, inclusions, and potential challenges.

With so much to accomplish on a site visit, we’ve compiled our TOP 10 tips on how to make the most of the time, and make it productive and fun for everyone involved.

SITE VISIT TOP 10

1. Build Your Team

Make sure you have a clear picture of your key stakeholders, decision makers, and project team. If specific members of your team will be managing certain elements of the event (i.e., branding and signage), ensure this is communicated early so everyone feels prepared and informed. This will also allow you to have a solid list of the individuals who must be at the site visit, as well as any additional team members that could benefit from attending, if availability permits.

2. Tackle Calendars

Even before you have narrowed down your list of potential venues, talk to the team you created above about their availability for a site visit, especially if it will involve travelling to a destination city. This allows you to act quickly once you’ve decided which venue(s) you need to see, and has the added benefit of helping manage travel costs. Juggling multiple calendars can often be the biggest obstacle in getting a site visit planned in a timely manner, so place some preliminary calendar holds early to maximize flexibility. 

3. Gauge Availability

Venues often have limited windows available to tour their spaces depending on what other groups they have in-house, so share your potential site visit dates with your shortlist of venues as early as you can (even before you’ve narrowed them down) to get a sense of any time blocks that definitely do or don’t work. You want to make sure you’re visiting at a time when you can see as much of the venue’s event/meeting space (and guestrooms, if visiting a hotel) as possible, so coordinating schedules with the property is critical.  

4. Must-See’s vs. Nice-to-Have’s

While it’s important to get out to site visits as soon as possible, you also need to ensure you understand your program requirements before you head out. What key space(s) do you need? What ancillary venues might you be looking for? How many guests are you expecting? Having realistic expectations of the program elements, at the very least, will allow you to make a list of what other arrangements you should be making while you’re in your destination or out touring spaces. What ‘bonus’ plans can you make to try and use your time as effectively as possible?

5. Be Efficient (But Don’t Overdo It)

Once you’ve made a list of all the places you need to see, work through the route that allows you to use your time most effectively and schedule accordingly. Try to avoid having to hop into Ubers back and forth across your destination city if you can cluster venues within similar areas on your itinerary. When trying to make the most of your time in a destination city, you may be tempted to overload your calendar and pack as much action as possible into just one or two days. This is an understandable approach, but it’s important to make sure you’re giving yourself an appropriate amount of time per visit. You want to account for transit time between visits, leave space for meals, schedule downtime to catch up on emails, and build in opportunities to debrief and discuss amongst yourselves where needed.

6. Do Your Reading

Familiarize yourself with the proposals you’ve received from each venue in advance of visiting the property. Try to wrap your head around floorplans, capacities, flow, offerings, and pricing so that you can spend your time onsite asking informed questions and identifying any potential obstacles or opportunities. Start plotting out potential areas for different elements of your program so you can evaluate the space with specific goals and requirements in mind. Prepare a list of questions and key considerations you want to make sure to cover, and don’t forget the things that can be unexpected (and unpleasant) surprises such as planned construction or renovations, wi-fi/mobile connectivity, and access to travel hubs like airports and train stations.

7. Consider Additional Attendees

Outside of your internal project team, are there any other individuals that would benefit from joining the visit, such as an external preferred production partner or graphic design team? If you know certain partners will be working on your program, you can sometimes avoid future site visits by involving them from the very beginning. They can also often spot things specific to their areas that you might otherwise have missed in your review, like key opportunities for the use of technology equipment or branding moments.

8. Over-Communicate

Create a site visit package (printed or digital) for all attendees that contains all the documents someone would need to prepare for each visit: proposals, floorplans, menus, etc. Critical to this package is an overview of the full site visit itinerary and a contact list for everyone participating. Distribute this early, along with detailed calendar invitations, to ensure everyone knows where they need to be and when.

9. Prepare to Return

While you will aim to accomplish as much as possible in your first visit, it’s inevitable in many cases (especially with complex programs and a longer lead time) that you’ll need to return for future visits to address specific portions of your event. Don’t be discouraged, this is totally normal and can often be incredibly helpful in fleshing out your event vision throughout the planning process. Make sure to budget for this eventuality.

10. Document Everything

We cannot stress this final, and critical, tip enough! Take more notes and photos than you think you need. With multiple venue visits in a short period of time, each ballroom starts to look like the next and it’s so easy to forget the countless details you see at each property. Designate someone to take notes (or make sure your entire team is prepared to, as often several side conversations can form with larger groups) and have someone in charge of taking photos of every space you see. We find it helpful to take a photo of the room name sign outside of the space before the space itself to help organize your photos once you get home. Also, incredibly valuable for future reference are walk-through videos describing the spaces as you go through them. This gives you something to fall back on when it all becomes a blur in the weeks to come, and allows you to share the experience with teammates who weren’t able to attend but can benefit from the orientation.

Site visits can be overwhelming to plan, but also such an exciting opportunity to start seeing your event vision come to life. Make the most of them to imagine all the possibilities and understand the potential attendee experience, so that you can be as prepared as possible in the planning process leading up to event day. 

The tips above will get you started in planning an effective visit, but remember there’s help available if you needed it. The LOMA Marketing Agency team are experts in venue sourcing and evaluation. If we can help you with your upcoming venue search, reach out to [email protected] and let’s discuss!