Five things to ask a venue before you sign
What to ask a venue before you book it
The venue visit is usually where the wrong questions get asked.
What is the capacity? What is included in the day rate? Can we see the catering menu? Is there parking? These questions are not wrong. They are just insufficient. They tell you whether a venue can accommodate your event. They do not tell you whether it is the right venue for your event, or whether the people running it on the day will make it work the way you need it to.
The difference between those two things is everything.
Here are the five questions that get to what actually matters.
1.
Who will be here on the day?
This is the most important question on the list, and the most consistently skipped.
The person showing you around the venue, who knows the answers to your questions and makes the space sound well-run and responsive, is often not the person who will be there when your event is happening. In venues that run multiple events simultaneously, the day-of team is stretched across bookings. The person who took your brief may have handed it to someone who has not read it properly, or at all.
Ask specifically: who is my point of contact from arrival to close? Will they be dedicated to my event or managing others simultaneously? How does briefing information get transferred from the sales team to the event production team?
Good venues can answer this clearly. At TOGETHER, every event has two dedicated points of contact: one to guide the booking from first conversation through to planning, and an Event Production Manager who owns the day. The person you speak to is the person who can make it happen. If a venue cannot tell you who that person will be before you arrive, that is a signal about how it operates.
2.
What does your sustainability reporting look like?
Not “are you sustainable?” Do not ask that. It is an invitation to a marketing answer that tells you nothing about actual practice.
Ask instead: do you measure the carbon footprint of individual events, or do you report across the portfolio? Is the building certified, and under what standard? How is food waste tracked and managed? What happens to the data after the event ends?
The specificity of the response will be more revealing than the content. A venue that can answer with figures, certifications, and named systems has done the work. A venue that answers with values statements and general commitments has not.
This matters increasingly for organisations with ESG reporting requirements. A post-event sustainability report with real numbers tied to your specific event is a deliverable with genuine value. General assurances are not.
3.
How does the catering operation work?
Catering is the area where the gap between what venues say and what they deliver is most pronounced. Ask direct questions.
Is the kitchen in-house or is catering outsourced to an external provider? If outsourced, to whom, and are they exclusive to your event or servicing others simultaneously? Where does the food come from? Is it prepared fresh on-site or brought in? How is the menu built: is it a fixed set of options, or adaptable to the event’s specific programme and timing?
The quality of the catering operation affects more than the food. It affects food waste and therefore the event’s environmental footprint. It affects how energised your delegates are by mid-afternoon. It affects whether the break between sessions feels like a pause worth having or an interruption to get through. These are not marginal considerations. The food is part of the event.
A venue with a genuinely good catering operation will answer these questions readily and in detail. Ask them anyway.
4.
What happens when something changes?
Events run differently to plan. This is not exceptional. It is the norm.
A session overruns by twenty minutes. Someone adds fifteen people to the registration list four days before the event. The AV fails at 9:20am. A speaker cancels the evening before. These situations are not hypothetical: they happen on almost every event, in some form, at some point.
Ask the venue what they do when the day does not run to schedule. Ask how they handle last-minute headcount changes to a catering order. Ask what the process is when AV fails. Ask who makes the call when something needs a quick decision on the floor.
A venue that has run events properly has been through these situations and has answers. A venue that seems surprised or vague in response to the question probably has not, or has handled them badly when they arose. The answer is not just about competence. It is about culture. You want to know whether the team treats problems as something to be managed quietly and efficiently, or as something to be explained away.
5.
Can I speak to a previous client?
A venue that is genuinely confident in the quality of what it delivers will say yes to this without hesitation.
A reference conversation gives you access to information that no brochure, site visit, or sales presentation can: what the event was actually like to run there, what the team was like on the day, what went well, what was difficult, and whether they would book again. Real answers from someone who was responsible for an event, not someone who is selling you one.
If the answer is no, or is slow, or is “we will look into that,” take note of it. A venue sitting on satisfied clients has every reason to connect you with them.
The question underneath all the questions
What you are really trying to establish across all five of these is whether the venue is actually on your side.
Some venues sell space. A booking is a booking: revenue in exchange for room access. The measure of success is that the event happened. What happened inside it is someone else’s concern.
The venues worth working with understand that their reputation is tied to yours. They want the event to go well because a good event produces a client who comes back, refers others, and says publicly what the day was like. That incentive structure changes how they engage with every question, every brief, and every decision on the floor.
Ask questions that reveal which type of venue you are dealing with. The answers will tell you almost everything you need to know before you sign.
If you are looking for a venue in the City of London and want to put those questions to us.
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Five things to ask a venue before you sign
Capacity, day rate, catering menus. These tell you whether a venue can accommodate your event. They do not tell you whether it is the right venue, or whether the people running it will make it work. Here are the five questions that get to what actually matters.