With Covid-19 having sudden and long‐lasting effects on meetings and events, venues are having to adapt to survive.
To discover how this has led to innovation and new opportunities at motor racing circuit Silverstone, Leicester-based agency SomeBrightSpark hosted a session on site with Hayley Smith, head of sales at Silverstone Circuits.
Smith said: “When it became clear just how serious the impact of coronavirus would be, we realised that we needed to adapt quickly to ensure the future of our business and, just before lockdown started, we invested some time creating a new mid‐term strategy. We realised that the lack of guidance we were receiving in the industry would impact us and we wanted to ensure we remained pro‐active in our approach across every aspect of our meetings and events business.
“We’re lucky at Silverstone in that we have a huge amount of space, both indoors and outdoors, which means we’ve been able to get really creative about what we can offer clients going forward and, as a result, have devised a range of new packages and options for meetings.
“We’ve also just come out of the very successful Formula One Grand Prix weekend at Silverstone. This was one of the biggest events to take place behind closed doors and reinforced the fact that were ready to reopen as soon as restrictions allow it.
“We are encouraging all event planners and organisers to be brave, bold and creative – we want to hear what you want to do and work together to achieve this at Silverstone. As an industry, together we are stronger and we want to inspire and encourage others to share best practice, talk more and to work together to achieve really creative and unusual events. We hope the video we’ve created with SomeBrightSpark shows that as a venue and a team, there are no limits to our creativity.”
Darren Spragg, strategy director at SomeBrightSpark, said: “Any creative loves a blank canvas, so opening up new spaces such as these at Silverstone offers the opportunity to create new and unique experiences. But, most important of all it provides another chance for people to be face to face again, which can only be a good thing.”
Smith added: “While there’s no denying things have been tough, enquiry levels in the last few weeks have definitely increased. They’re not yet on a par to what we were receiving pre Covid‐19 but we’re well on our way back. As a team we’re confident that our adaptability and the sheer size and flexibility of the spaces we have at Silverstone mean that we’re a very attractive proposition for events going forward.”
M&IT editor Paul Harvey is a journalist with more than 15 years of experience. He began his career in the local press, working for various titles across the north. Since joining M&IT in 2013, he has become a trusted and respected voice in the sector, championing event professionals and reporting on all aspects of the events industry for the brand.
