Everybody asks the price and the capacity. The three that actually decide whether your evening works are asked far less often.
People ring a hall, ask what it costs and how many it seats, and book it. Then they ring us, and about a third of the time we have to explain why the evening they have described cannot happen in the room they have taken. Here are the three questions we wish everybody asked first.
The first is what time we can get in. Not what time the event can start: what time the doors open to us with the room empty. A hall that hands over at two o'clock for a seven o'clock event gives five hours, which is comfortable. A hall with a lunch booking that clears at four gives three, and three hours means no rehearsal, no time to test a video on the actual screen, and a crew still working when the first guests park outside. It is the single biggest difference between a calm evening and a rushed one, and it is almost never on the price list.
The second is what the power situation is. Ask how many sockets there are, on how many circuits, and where they are. A hall with two sockets on one circuit at the back wall is a hall where the sound, the lights and the caterer's warmers are all on the same breaker, and the breaker will go during the speeches. We can bring distribution and a generator, but it has to be quoted, and it needs to be known in advance rather than discovered at four o'clock.
The third is what is fixed in the room. Fixed seating, a fixed stage at the wrong height, pillars in the middle, a ceiling too low for a screen big enough for the back row. Ask whether you may hang anything from the ceiling, because in most halls in Male the answer is no and every backdrop then has to be free standing, which changes both the look and the price.
Two smaller ones worth adding. Ask who else is using the building that evening, because a wedding sharing a car park with a conference is a wedding whose guests cannot park. And ask what time you have to be out, then subtract the hour it takes to strike, and see whether your evening still ends when you thought it did.
None of this is a criticism of the halls. They are honest about all of it when asked. The trouble is that the question people ask is always the price, and the price is the thing that tells you least.
