It’s safe to say that London is one of the major capitals of the world and is a great choice of location for hosting conferences and similar events. The name “London” is often used to describe not just the capital itself but the surrounding area though, in fact, the correct term for London and its environs is “Greater London”.
Hosting an event in the centre of London will often make it more attractive to potential attendees than hosting it on the outskirts. Thus, for example, choosing an event location near Heathrow will enable delegates to travel to the event very easily, typically taking a taxi directly from Heathrow airport to their hotel or even directly to the event location. However, there is not much to see or do in the Heathrow area and, if delegates plan to make the most of their visit to the capital, they may face several long tube journeys to and from central London.
Whatever your event, if you decide to host it in central London, you will almost certainly have to pay a premium. Those expensive central London post codes are easy to identify. If the first three characters of a postcode contain the letter “C” or the number “1”, then the location is very central and you will pay for the luxury of hosting your event there. With the most expensive commercial rents and therefore hire charges being found in postcodes “W1” (the West End), “EC1”, “EC2”, “EC3” and “EC4” (the City of London), “WC1” ( Bloomsbury and Gray’s Inn) and “WC2” (Covent Garden, Holborn and the Strand).
Perhaps you are a software company wanting to arrange training sessions for an international client base. You decide to take the route of computer training room hire. You have several different options. One would be to host the event in a hotel. This would have the benefit of convenience: once delegates reach the hotel, they have reached the venue and will have no more travel worries. However, the conference rooms available in hotels are not specially designed to host training events and you may need to factor in the extra work involved in coordinating the hiring and configuration of laptops or PCs, the hire of a projector and so forth.
You also have the option of hiring a training room from a specialist training room hire company. Here you would lose the convenience of having the event location coincide with the training venue. However, you can expect to walk into a fully configured training room with all the equipment and facilities you are likely to need such as internet access and a projector connected to the PC being used by the trainer. Most IT training companies will also be happy to install software for you in advance of the trainer, either as part of their standard room hire facility or for an additional hourly charge.
The writer of this article is a developer and trainer a UK IT training company offering ASP.NET and AJAX Classes at their central London training centre.