Rome, Milan, Venice, Florence or Puglia: choosing the destination
By the time a destination reaches my desk it has usually been chosen on a mood board. That is fine: the client buys the city, not the transfer plan. But whether that city works for a group of two hundred is decided by four things nobody puts on the mood board: how people arrive, where they sleep, how long it takes to move them, and what else that city is doing that week.
The city is chosen before the logistics
I do not think that order is wrong. A destination is a promise the client makes to their own people, and promises are made on images. What I think is wrong is treating the logistics as something that will adapt to the choice afterwards.
In Italy the five names that come up most often for corporate groups are Rome, Milan, Venice, Florence and Puglia. On a shortlist they look like five versions of the same product. On the ground they are five different operating problems, and the cost and the risk of the programme sit in those differences, not in the hotel rate. Across more than 250 projects, the destination decisions I have seen go badly were almost never wrong about the city. They were wrong about what the city would ask of the group.
Five cities, the first question I ask about each
Each of these places has one question that decides more than all the others. It is the one I ask before I look at any venue.
Rome: where does the group need to be during the day?
The arrival is the easy part: Fiumicino is a real long-haul hub, and for a group flying in from North America it is the simplest landing of the five. The hard part is the centre, which was not built for coaches and does not pretend otherwise. Access for large vehicles is restricted, and the rules are not something you want to learn from a driver on the morning itself. A transfer of three kilometres across the centre at seven in the evening is not priced in kilometres. So in Rome I plan the day around where people sleep, and I keep the number of times the whole group has to move as low as the programme allows.
Milan: which fair is on that week?
Milan runs on a trade calendar before it runs on a tourist one. The furniture fair in April, the fashion weeks, the large exhibitions at the fairground outside the city: in those weeks hotel availability and rates move in a way that has nothing to do with the season, and a group block that was easy in one week is impossible in the next. The second thing I check is the airport. Malpensa, where most long-haul flights land, is around fifty kilometres from the centre, and that hour belongs in the arrival day.
Venice: how many times does the group move?
In Venice everything that moves goes by water: the people, the luggage, the set, the catering. An airport arrival for a large group is a fleet of boats with a timetable, not a coach. A build is a delivery by barge booked against a slot, and in autumn and winter the tide is part of the schedule. None of this makes Venice a bad choice. It makes every movement of the group a small operation of its own, so the question is how many of them the programme really needs.
Florence: how many rooms in one property?
The centre is compact and walkable, which is exactly why groups love it. What the photographs do not show is that much of the hotel stock in the centre is made of small and mid-sized properties, so a large group often ends up split. The airport is small as well, and many international groups actually arrive through Rome, Milan or Pisa and finish the journey by train or coach. That is a fine plan, as long as it is the plan from the start and not something discovered when the flights are booked.
Puglia: how far apart will people sleep?
Puglia is a region, not a city, and it is long. There are two main airports at either end of it, and the properties people ask for are often beautiful farmhouses with a limited number of rooms. Put a group of 150 into that landscape and it can easily end up across three or four properties, half an hour or more from each other. At that point the transfers are not a line in the budget. They are the programme, and every shared moment has to be built around them. Much of the region also works seasonally, so a date outside the main season changes what is open, not only what it costs.
One hotel or four
If I could ask a client only one question about a destination, it would be this: can the whole group sleep under one roof? It is a more useful filter than the budget, because it decides almost everything that follows.
One property means one check-in, one meeting point, one breakfast, one place where a speaker who is running late can be found. Two or three properties mean a shuttle plan, a host in each lobby, a different departure time from each, and the evening dinner starting only when the furthest group has arrived. None of this is impossible, and I run split groups often. But the cost of the split does not appear on the hotel quote. It appears in the transfers, in the staffing and in the minutes lost every time the group has to come back together.
So when two destinations are close on everything else, I would choose the one where the group stays together.
The local calendar nobody puts in the brief
Italy has a national calendar and, underneath it, a local one. Each city has its own patron saint's day, and on that day the city stops while the rest of the country works: 29 June in Rome, 24 June in Florence, 7 December in Milan. Offices close, some suppliers do not work, and anything that needed a signature that day waits until the next one.
August is the same idea on a national scale. Much of the supply chain slows down or stops around the middle of the month, which matters less for an event held in August than for an event in September whose confirmations were supposed to happen in August. Add the long weekends that form when a holiday falls next to a weekend, and the working calendar of a project in Italy can be noticeably shorter than the one drawn on the Gantt.
None of this is exotic. It is simply a rhythm, and I build the timeline on it from the first day rather than meeting it halfway through.
What I want settled before the destination is announced
Once a destination has been announced to the client's people, changing it costs credibility as well as money. So before that moment I want four answers on paper, not in conversation:
- The real arrival. Which airport, how far, how long, and what happens to a delayed flight.
- The room block. In how many properties, and how far apart.
- The movements. How many times the whole group has to go from one place to another, and how long each one really takes at that hour.
- The calendar. What else is happening in that city in those dates, and what the local calendar takes away from the working weeks before.
If all four answers are good, the destination can be whatever the mood board says. If one of them is weak, it is far cheaper to know now than in the week before the event. Choosing the venue inside that city comes next, and I have written about it in choosing a venue for a corporate event in Italy.
Weighing Italian destinations for a group you already have?
Write to me with the destinations on the table, the dates and the headcount. We will work out how I can support you and which service fits your case.
Write to meFor the stages every project goes through, start with how to organize a corporate event in Italy. If the programme moves between several of these cities, see running a programme across several cities. Leading the project from the first brief to the debrief is part of the event management service.