Why teams land on the Bath Road
Lay a map of where your team is flying in from over a map of London and the airport is often the only point that is fair to everybody. That is why the big hotels along the Bath Road do more group business than anybody outside them suspects: sales meetings, project teams flown in from four countries, a board that gathers here because every member can be home the same night. Stockley Park is a few minutes north by road, and the conference floors on the row were built for exactly this.
The row suits a group for practical reasons too. The hotels are large, several have meeting rooms and a dining room that can take a long table, and they stand within a few minutes of each other along one road, so a team split across two buildings is still one team. The central terminals are around ten minutes away by car, which makes arrivals and departures on different flights manageable rather than a logistical exercise.
How a block is quoted
Do not book ten rooms through a public website. Write to the hotel's group or events team with the dates, the number of rooms each night, the mix of single and double occupancy, and any meeting space or dinner you want, and ask for a group quotation. What comes back is usually a contract: a set number of rooms on set nights at an agreed group rate, with the terms that govern any change written into it.
Ask two or three hotels on the row at the same time; they know about each other and quote accordingly. Be flexible about the nights if you can, because the middle of the working week is when the row is busiest with business travellers and crew, and a block that avoids the tightest nights is easier to place. Before you sign, read the contract for three things: the release date, the attrition allowance, and what happens to meals and meeting rooms if your numbers fall.
The release date that catches organisers out
Every block has a cut off, commonly a few weeks before arrival, by which you must send the rooming list with a name against every room. Any room without a name by that date goes back on general sale. Nobody rings to remind you. The first an organiser usually hears of it is when a late addition to the team is told the hotel is full, or offered the room at whatever the public rate happens to be that week.
The fix is simple and almost nobody applies it: put the release date in the diary a fortnight early, and send a provisional rooming list well before it, with placeholders where names are not yet known. Ask at the outset how many rooms you can hand back without penalty and until when, because the attrition clause, the share of the block you are allowed to shed, is the other half of the same trap. Cutting a block after the release date is nearly always the expensive way to do it.
Arrivals on different flights
A team rarely arrives together. Send the hotel the flight times along with the rooming list, ask for early check in for anybody landing on a morning long haul, and make sure late arrivals are guaranteed, so that the colleague who lands at eleven does not find the room given away at six. Name one person as the hotel's contact and hold to it; a group with three organisers writing to the same events team is a group that ends up with two sets of name badges.
Ground transport matters more here than in town. The hotel shuttles and the local buses run along the front of the row, but a team landing together with luggage wants a booked transfer rather than a queue at the bus stop. Tell the hotel's events team the plan; the big hotels on this road are used to groups arriving in waves, and they would rather know in advance than improvise at the door.
A bar that holds everybody
At some point on the first night the whole team will want to be in one room with a drink, and not every hotel on the row can manage it. The big hotels at the eastern end have the public space for a group, with long bars and room to spread out, and one of them keeps a covered courtyard at its centre where a large party can sit under cover without taking over the building; and which rooms on the row still have a full bath is worth knowing before you book a block.
Whichever you choose, tell the hotel in advance that the team will gather at nine and ask for an area to be held. Thirty people arriving unannounced at a hotel bar at the same moment as a crew coach makes for an evening spent standing. Hotels on this road are good at holding a corner when they are asked and poor at conjuring one when they are not.
The organiser's own evening
The person who arranged all of this spends the week looking after everybody else, and at the client dinner is often the only one without a plus one. Conference hotels and client tables is the booking for that evening: a companion briefed in advance, who knows the name you would like used and the plain story of how you know each other, and who can hold her own at a table of strangers. Three hours is £700 and the dinner length is £900; she is paid by hand when she arrives, and nothing appears on the hotel bill or on the company's master account.
Nancy is completely at home in a room of strangers and about as unflappable as anybody on the rota. Michelle knows every entrance on the row and turns a stiff first quarter hour into an easy one without anybody noticing how it happened. Nora works Hayes, is straightforward and good humoured, and can frequently be placed at short notice, which matters when a dinner is only confirmed the day before; she is on the toned and athletic tag. Send Hester the hotel, the date and a short brief, and she will say who is free.
Filed under: most of the names in this piece also sit under blondes in the by tag.