Why would the public sector need to villa park when council own Icc , talk about pissing money away!!
Apart from the fact they don't own the ICC, what do you think the costs are in using a venue like Villa Park versus the ICC? VP would be miles cheaper.
Even if they did, the ICC would be run as an independent business and there would be no chance of facilities been given to areas of the public sector for free/cheap.
Having worked in a Birmingham hotel till the start of last year and I don't imagine things have changed too much but places are surviving on very fine margins. Meetings and conference facilities are so competitive some places are pretty much giving away the service which only ends up making it worse for everyone else as venues will be expected to match that rate, when often it is just not feasible. Staffing is at a bare mimimum, the amount of staff at my hotel when i started in 2007 was much greater than when I left, it wasn't redundencies but it just wasn't possible most of the time to replace people when they left.
We had conferences ranging in size for local education and NHS as well as the city council.
I would guess as well that a hotel can run events as a loss-leader to get delegates to stay in their rooms/use the bar & restaurant whereas a football club doesn't have such facilities.
Thats true, and does put Villa at a disadvantage, and they used the hotel I worked at for rooms sometimes. Although I did mean to say day delegate rates when I posted originally.
