What our clients say

As 2024 draws to a close, each of the stats and wins we’re reflecting on are more than just our headlines of the year. They also represent countless hours of work from our dedicated team, as we’ve pooled together multiple areas of creative event expertise to forge incredible results for our clients. This vision and this level of commitment aren’t unique to 2024. It’s something that has defined how we’ve operated for the last 25 years and will continue to shape the positive impact we create in years to come. Not just within our team, or for our clients, but for the thousands of attendees whose lives we’ve touched with our strategically crafted experiences over the last year. 

With that in mind, let’s unwrap our successes of 2024.

2024: Our growth

Throughout our evolution to strengthen our position as a full-service event agency, we’re incredibly proud of the results we’ve created, both for our clients and our team, and across our community engagement. 

In 2024 we have: 

• Delivered 223 event experiences across multiple cities, countries, and continents. 
• Expanded our in-house services by hiring 19 new team members, and creating 7 new roles across our different disciplines. 
• Promoted 14 of our team members for their hard work and commitment.
• Received 7 award nominations, including Micebook’s Best Agency of the Year and C&IT’s UK Agency of the Year. 
• Been named one of the Sunday Times Best Places to Work, for the second year in a row.

Thought leadership: Starting important conversations

At First Event we like to be generous with our collective expertise. 2024 was about us owning that position as thought leader, and sharing our experience and insights across our industry and wider communities. Over the last year we:  

• Sponsored and spoke at the Prolific North Marketing Fest about what it takes to create truly iconic experiences.
• Collaborated with Campaign UK and C&IT on a podcast centered around mastering event marketing in 2024.
• Took part in a panel at CVent, discussing gender parity and transforming the workplace through the “Destroying the Glass Ceiling” initiative.

Giving back through community engagement:

Beyond our business success, we’ve continued our passion for making a difference to the wider communities that we are a part of. This year we: 

• Sent two team members to Africa to visit the school the company sponsors. 
• Participated in charity events, including a dragon boat race and the CEO Sleepout, raising funds for the homeless. 
• Hosted our own First In thought-leadership event experience, designed to engage key individuals in the industry. 

Looking ahead:

Over the next year, we plan to continue and consolidate the level of growth we’ve seen in 2024, gathering momentum as we further embrace our full-service offering as a creative event agency. In 2025, we’re looking forward to using our access to the latest data and insights to help clients craft targeted event experiences, executed strategically to realise their long-term business goals. We will continue to bring our clients' vision to life with purpose and creativity, combining strategic insight with flawless execution and building impactful experiences that inspire audiences.

Want to be part of our 2025 story? 

We’ve got a range of different ways for you to stay in touch over the coming months: 

• Reach out to the team to discuss a full-service partnership in 2025. 
• Explore our services, and consider how we might be able to inject our expertise and support your business growth in 2025. 
• Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or X.

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Following ongoing client attendee interactions and our extensive research, our findings indicate a key focus of event trends in 2025: putting individual attendees at the heart of the brand experiences. In this blog, we’ll be sharing the practical tips needed to harness manifestations of this core trend across your business and create impactful events that align with your wider business goals. 

Technological Innovations 

The key to event marketing success in 2025 will be incorporating emerging trends in technology in a way that is relevant both to your brand, your audience, and the current event planning landscape. To create this approach, brands should focus on using these innovations to transform the connectivity, engagement, and accessibility of their brand experiences. Consider:

• Creating an internet of things for truly smart events, facilitating a truly seamless and connected attendee experience. 
• Integrating AI,  AR and VR thoroughly into your campaigns, not just as a novelty.
• Rethinking your virtual and hybrid strategies, with a focus on accessing and actioning real-time feedback from your event. 

Sustainable Practices 

In 2025, people want brands to take the lead on their sustainable living, with 62% of people stating that they expect CEOs to manage wider societal changes (Edelman Trust Barometer, 2024). For event planning, this goes beyond zero-waste events, and outsourcing to sustainable suppliers and venues. Now, people want businesses to do sustainable deeds on their behalf, giving them visibility on how much impact they can have on people and the planet. By giving people clarity over the consequences of their sustainable actions, guests will feel more centred on the brand experience, deepening their connection with your business. 

The rise of personalised, data-driven brand experiences 

Hyper-personalised brand experiences are an incredibly effective approach to achieving brand loyalty, with 56% of shoppers stating they’d be more likely to buy from brands that offer personalised experiences. This starts with looking at the data you have on your audience, and using these insights to create individual attendee journeys that truly engage different segments of your audience. Whether you achieve this through AI-driven personalisation, or creating micro and local events to engage different regions, successful data optimisation will depend on integrating with an advanced analytic platform, for tracking and interpreting attendee touchpoints. 

The growing focus on wellness and mental health 

In line with the main, attendee-focused approach to 2025, people are expecting hyper-personalisation to manifest in how brands are looking after their mental health and well-being. However, due to the saturation of these popular markets, people have grown sceptical of the impact of health and wellness initiatives. In 2025, this trend will create the space for brands to lean into the data behind their wellness initiatives, offering deeply targeted and personalised mental health and wellness interventions. 

Enhancing networking and engagement 

With approximately 2.5 million adults in England reporting that they are chronically lonely, people are looking for opportunities to make real connections with people who already have shared interests. Brands can meet this need by using AI matchmaking to ease the pressures around social situations, and rethinking their virtual and in-person event strategy, to bring a hybrid-first event design, rather than seeing virtual elements as a last-minute add-on, often to the exclusion of virtual attendees. 

Want to navigate the event trends of 2025 to create long-term success for your brand? 

Get in touch with the First Event team. As your full-service event agency partner, we can help you implement emerging event trends through a tailored strategy designed to bring you closer to your business objectives. 

Coming up with creative ideas to engage your audience is one thing. But for brands that really want to create trackable impact, you need to be able to fuse that creative direction with an insight-led strategy. 

What is strategic event planning? 

Strategic event planning is a multi-phase process that goes beyond logistics to create meaningful, goal-aligned event experiences. This means creating a comprehensive event plan, mapping out exactly how you’re going to achieve your goals, and then using insights to refine your strategy for future event success.

In this blog we’ll be sharing our expertise on applying strategic event planning to every element of your event lifecycle, from initial ideation, to post-event analysis. 

Step 1: Define your goals and event objectives 

Creating an event strategy without understanding your event goals is like trying to navigate a path without knowing the end destination. By ensuring that your event strategy goals reflect the aims of your wider business strategy, you can confidently make progress in the right direction for your business.

With your event goals and KPIs clarified, you also need to select the right technology to measure this, ensuring that the systems and enhancements you harness streamline your processes, enhance attendee engagement, or help to measure an element of your event experience. 

Step 2: Know your audience 

Part of being able to create an event that creates results within your attendees is understanding exactly who those attendees are. Invest the time in researching your audience, in particular their: 

• Preferences 
• Expectations 
• Demographics 
• Behaviours 
• Interests 

With these insights, you can tailor the event experience to their needs, and this will inform the strategy of your event plan. 

Step 3: Harness event expertise

When creating your team, you need to ensure you’re fulfilling the relevant specialisms that are required by your event concept, and your wider strategy. Across your people, you need to be able to access and harness the latest insights and technology, as well as innovative creative direction, ensuring they’re applied holistically across your strategy. 

Step 4: Design the event experience 

Now you can begin to map out: 

• The event offering
• How attendees will interact with this event experience
• The event content that will be used to deliver key business messages

With this clear event offering and attendee journey in place, you can then look to elevate these with speakers, partnerships or engagement tools. But for every elevation you make, you have to ensure that this arches back to your main event goals and the wider message of your brand and your event strategy.

Step 5: Execute and elevate

Every element of the logistics of your event should ladder back up to the key purpose of the event and stay aligned with your wider business goals. Use your insights about your attendees to craft and execute delegate management plans that anticipate their needs, for a slick and seamless attendee experience.

Step 6: Distil, understand, and action 

Using the tools and technology you agreed at the outset of your planning process, measure your metrics to determine whether event success was achieved or not. It’s also useful to look beyond the confines of your definition of event success, to see if there are any areas where you created unexpected impact on your attendees. You can use these to refine the focus of your event strategy, and create more targeted events in the future. 

Ready to bring a consistent approach to your strategic event planning? Get in touch with the First Event team, and let us be your partner in crafting your vision, and turning this into a strategic plan for brand event success.

Not only can emerging technologies make sustainable initiatives more accessible for growing businesses, they also equip brands with an extra dimension of intelligence into their audience. But to access these benefits, stay competitive in a shifting landscape, and achieve their event objectives, brands must continuously look for new ways to leverage these innovations and the insights they provide. 

In this blog we’ll be examining how event technology creates event success across four main elements of brand experiences: 

• Interactivity 
• Streamlining 
• Personalisation 
• Sustainability 

In each of these areas, we’ll also explore the technology that businesses can start to implement across their experiences and event objectives on a practical level. 

Interactivity

Interactivity is what enables attendees to feel truly engaged and valued by brands, and is something that can be supported by event technology across each stage of the event lifecycle. For brands looking to include their attendees in the ‘wow moments’ of their experiences, technology such as AR and VR can add an extra level of interactivity to how your attendees immerse themselves in your experience. When used for things like product demonstrations, or even keynote addresses, there are a range of ways that cutting-edge event tech like this can impact the interactivity of your event experience. 

Personalisation 

To further boost how easily your attendees can engage with your event experience, personalisation can create an even more compelling reason for your attendees to connect with your brand offering. Using data collected from technology deployed from previous events, unearth the top level insights into your audience, and weave your audience’s throughout your experience touchpoints. 

Event trends such as bluetooth tracking can add another level of personalisation to your event strategy, monitoring the movements of your attendees, and using AI to analyse how they engage with the different elements of your event experience. This event technology can also be used to trigger notifications on attendee devices based on which event touchpoint they’re interacting with, creating a more personalised experience.

Streamlining

From using centralised event management systems for simplified execution, to using AI to support the generation of event content and communications, technology can be harnessed to streamline the execution of branded experiences. Using event technology like QR codes and biometrics, attendees can experience a seamless and secure ticketing and check-in process. Additionally, allowing attendees to interact with your brand through an AI optimised floor plan, or on a 5G network that allows for a more reactive event experience, event technology can be used to boost the seamlessness of the event experience, at all stages of the event life cycle. 

Sustainability 

Sustainability is one of the main priorities of the event industry, and something that people are looking for more and more from the brands that they support. By tapping into event trends and technology, brands can continue to deepen their commitment to protecting people and the planet as part of their event goals. Particularly through hybrid and live streaming event models, brands can create inclusive experiences that go beyond geographical limitations, without compromising on how immersive the experience is. Additionally, by harnessing the technology of native event apps, brands can create paperless experiences for their attendees, without the need for single-use resources. 

Get in touch!

To stay ahead of the curve of cutting-edge event technology, you need an event partner that can lend their market expertise to add targeted elevations across every stage of your event lifecycle. 

If you’re ready to work with a partner that keeps your event strategy informed and your brand offering competitive, get in touch with the team at First Event.

Events are an essential part of any marketing strategy. But just like other marketing efforts, businesses need to know with certainty that their strategies are having the desired impact on their target audience, and their wider business goals. In this blog, we’ll be exploring how brands can harness the latest tech and AI tools to track the right data, and how to untangle raw analytics into clear action points that bring innovation to event marketing strategies. 

Capturing the right data 

The mistake that brands often make is trying to measure lots of different data points, without considering how having this insight will contribute to their wider event goals. Not all metrics are relevant for every event, and by focusing on the right metrics, brands can continuously refine their branded events for maximum innovation and impact. 

Innovation driven event planning starts with understanding the specific goals for each event, and mapping out the different data points you’ll need to measure in order to know if this has been achieved or not. With this clarified, you can then begin to plan which key metrics you need to capture throughout your event lifecycle, assigning the right event tech and AI tools to do so.

Key event metrics to measure 

Depending on your wider event goals, you may wish to measure the following data points: 

Attendee participation 

Get insights how engaged your attendees were with your content, and how much they interacted with your experience by measuring:

• Engagement with event content - Use AI-powered tools to track attendees’ facial expressions in real time to record the sentiment towards different stages of your attendee experience.
• Q&A and live polling response - Use insights from your engagement and gamification tools to understand the peak areas of your event content. 

Sponsor value and ROI

Understand the value that your event sponsors unlocked from supporting your event, and use these insights to tailor your future sponsor packages. Record data points such as: 

• Sponsor interaction - Track physical footfall or virtual traffic to understand how your sponsor’s content impacted your attendee experience.
• Social media tracking - Understand the reach of your sponsor branded content.  

Lead generation and brand awareness 

See how your event strategy has impacted on your sales pipeline, and your relationship with your audience, by tracking key metrics such as: 

• Lead quality scores - Use a CRM system or a lead capture tool to understand the strength of your leads and where they originated from.
• Social listening tools - Get up to date analytics on how the online conversation around your brand has changed following your event. 

Analysing and implementing your data 

Once you’ve collected all your relevant data points, the most challenging part of refining your insight-led event planning is translating your data into concrete statements about your brand and your audience. Especially if you’ve collected data across different platforms, the first thing to do is to collate it all into one place, and use AI tools to unearth analytics into the trends that have emerged throughout your event lifecycle. With these top-level insights clarified, you then need to action these and update your event marketing strategy. Understand areas for improvement, set new goals for the next iteration of your event, and adjust your event strategy accordingly. 

Ready to bring a data-centric approach to your event marketing

Get in touch to discuss how the First Event team can support as your event partner, bringing insight-backed expertise to refine your event strategy and elevate your attendee experience.

When we think of legacy events that create cultural impact, we tend to picture historic moments like the Olympics, the Super Bowl, or Royal Weddings. But with the right event strategy, brands can access this level of wide-scale and long-term event impact to drive their brand legacy. Rather than using events as one-off marketing tactics, brands are harnessing the long-term potential of marketing strategies to innovate their attendee experiences, deepen customer loyalty, and build their brand. 

What is brand building? 

Brand building is the process of transforming your brand from a 2D concept into a 3D, living and breathing experience that your audience can hook into. By consistently reflecting your brand values and identity throughout strategic and innovative event experiences, brands can create long-term benefits for their brand perception, bringing them renewable and sustainable relationships with truly engaged audience members. 

But how can brands use strategic events to bring this all-important extra dimension to their marketing strategies? Let’s take a look at three of the core pillars to creating long term brand awareness with event marketing that you can incorporate into your event planning process.  

Create a Strong Impression

When crafting your event strategy, you need to factor in how you’ll achieve each of these three elements required to create a strong human connection.

• Reflecting brand values across all touchpoints: To create an experience that feels authentic to your brand, every element of your event needs to reflect the values and messages that are integral to your brand identity. 
• Driving emotional connections: Using innovative storytelling techniques, AI tools, and advanced technology that enhances your attendee experience, you can use your event content to drive the emotional connections that forge long-term connections between your brand and your audience. 
• Meeting a need within your audience: Identify the gap, or the need that exists within your audience, and then craft the event offering that meets this need. With this core value clarified, you then begin building the experience itself, adding activations and AI-powered features that appeal to each of the five senses for a truly immersive, branded experience.

Be Consistent

To create truly long-term results, you need a long-term strategy. As well as crafting experiences with long-term impact, you also need to reinforce this with consistent and long-term brand visibility. Consider how you show up for the different groups within your audience, and how you can adapt your event planning approach to fit the different needs and interests of target demographics. This could look like offering a range of different event types, from large-scale conferences to more intimate and curated workshops. Even though how you show up for your audience might change, what should stay consistent across each of these experiences is your brand narrative and the value you’re adding to your audience. 

Measure your impact: Data & Analytics 

Without determining what successful, long-term brand building looks like for your business, it’s impossible to build an effective event strategy that achieves this. From the very outset of your event planning, clearly define what change you want to achieve with your audience long-term, the data points you need to record to measure this, and the tech you’re going to use to do so. Armed with this data and analytics, you can then use this to adapt your future event strategy, creating experiences that drive even more effective impact on your target audience. 

Ready to level up your brand-building with strategic events? 

Get in touch with the team at First Event. Our teams can re-evaluate your existing marketing strategies, and identify opportunities for creating longer-term impact through your attendee experiences.

Against the backdrop of vanishing marketing budgets, brands are now looking for new and effective ways to create impactful interactions with their target audience.

Now, brands can use events as an extension of their existing marketing strategy, creating experiences that foster lasting loyalty and are community-building by harnessing both creativity and tech to drive those core messages home. 

As a full service events agency we bring a strategic and bespoke approach to the experiences for our clients. Here, Alex Melia, our Head of Marketing, shares the importance of events and how they can be used in wider marketing strategies. 

Whether interacting with people, products, or content, people engage with brands every single day. Those looking to turn these passing interactions into meaningful and long-lasting engagements must ask themselves: how can we add another dimension to the way we communicate with our audience?  

For us, the answer has always been a targeted events strategy, bringing a combination of technology and creativity to your wider marketing. 

Events are more than just finite moments. Done right, they are the loudest part of a marketing strategy. They represent a melting pot of memorable legacies being forged in real time, and a platform where consistent brand messaging can be infused through every component of the experience. It’s through events that brands can craft their immersive world and create valuable face-to-face interaction with their target audience. 

But, to achieve a truly impactful event marketing strategy that successfully delivers that added dimension, brands must first look to clarify and consolidate their context.   

By prioritising this from the outset, brands can then layer the requisite technology and creativity that reinforces that context. So often we see this being approached in the wrong order. As exciting new technology emerges, the pressure to incorporate it into an event strategy wherever possible, and stay ahead of tech trends, can be overwhelming. But brands that have an in-depth understanding of their event objectives and longer-term aims can strategically implement technology that measures the relevant insights, rather than retrofitting technology for the wrong reasons. 

With that key, unifying context in mind, it’s then up to brands to replicate that message via different touchpoints through engaging and inspiring event content. From our experience, you get the greatest return on tech integrations when it’s used to magnify a solid creative offering that’s already there. It’s not something to hide patchy brand messaging behind. Start with strong content that would still deliver the same message, even when communicated in its most simple format, then look to extend that through amazing tech and innovative design. 

As well as integrating these core messages and content at every attendee touchpoint throughout the event, brands should also focus on creating a handful of standout moments that follow the ‘Peak End’ rule. 

This psychological principle suggests that people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience. This rule highlights the importance of creating strong, positive peaks throughout the event and ensuring a favourable conclusion to leave a lasting, iconic impression.

After the event itself has finished, the work doesn’t stop there. Post-event engagement is where iconic experiences can be made or broken. Creating something that lives on after a live event should be more engaging, creative, accessible, and focused on key takeaways. Post-event content needs to be positioned differently to your during-event experience, but is by no means less of a priority for your strategy. 

By employing techniques that surpass conventional presentations through interactive elements, immersive environments, and captivating storytelling, brands can use events to turn their marketing strategy from 2D to 3D. 

In today’s corporate events landscape, employees’ priorities are constantly changing. So when it comes to incentivising your teams, there simply isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach that will guarantee success. That’s why brands need to go beyond just simple reward schemes, and craft bespoke and adaptable incentive strategies driven by impactful and inclusive event experiences that can evolve alongside changing workforce priorities. 

But why exactly should brands look to modernise and future-proof their corporate events incentive strategies? What long-term results will it unlock for their business? 

What are the benefits of incentives? 

The benefits of incentives can be split into hard benefits, and soft benefits. Hard benefits are defined as being the trackable impact of incentive schemes on your business, such as driving sales, revenue and profit. On the other hand you have soft benefits, which include: 

• Creating employee culture 
• Building strong relationships in the team 
• Driving employee engagement 
• Fostering a sense of purpose 

Despite their ‘soft’ label, the conversation around these benefits have changed, with many industry leaders now deeming them as more significant than hard benefits, owing to their long-lasting effects on a business. As such, brands are using incentive events to harness these soft benefit ROIs, with a staggering 90% of global companies using ‘non cash incentives’ to retain talent. 

But what strategies can brands deploy to access these benefits for their businesses? 

Let’s take a look at a tried and tested process for creating incentive success.

Techniques to Revolutionise your Incentive Schemes in 2025

Step 1: Map Out Your Goals & Align with Your Purpose 

Consider exactly what it is that you want to achieve from this event. From this central purpose, you can then begin to assign clear goals and KPIs to your incentive, and ensure that the design of the event experience itself ladders back to that core goal you’re trying to achieve. 

Step 2: Understand Your People 

Crafting the kind of inclusive experience that will incentivise your people starts with understanding what makes your teams tick. Compile as much data as you can about your teams, in terms of what they value, the kind of content they want to interact with, and how they want to be communicated with. Without hard data and evidence to back up your incentive strategy, you run the risk of creating an incentive offering that sparks indifference, rather than action. 

Step 3: Build the Buzz 

You need an expertly designed communication strategy to keep your employee engagement high. Craft a targeted and personalised email campaign to your attendees, packed with tantalising information about the impactful experiences that await them on their trip. 

Step 4: Personalised and Seamless: Nail Your Execution

To create the kind of unforgettable experience that will be talked about for years to come, and create long-term results for your business, your attendees need to feel truly valued and appreciated at every stage of their event journey. A slick and seamless logistical plan to your event, punctuated with those wow-factor moments, is essential to building a winning incentive experience. 

Top Tip!

To elevate the incentive even further, brands can add personalised touches to already impactful experiences, such as tailored room drops, branded event swag, and personalised daily itineraries. 

Ready to rethink your approach to incentive events? 

Now is the time to start thinking ahead to plan your future incentive strategy, perfectly designed to drive employee engagement. 

Get in touch with the First Event team to discuss how we can bring our incentive expertise to craft a bespoke strategy, designed to transform your employee culture. 

Storytelling is a crucial tool for creating more profound and long-lasting engagement among your audience. But for brands that want to go beyond outdated storytelling formats, and truly enable their audience to hook into their brand narrative, they need to unlock the power of truly immersive storytelling at corporate events.

What is immersive storytelling and why is it so important for event experiences? 

Unlike traditional storytelling, which often puts the audience in a passive role as the listener, immersive storytelling invites attendees to be active participants in a story that they have shaped themselves. This shift from passive to active creates real results for both your audience engagement and your brand, including: 

• Engaging your audience on a deeper level 
• Prolonging your event legacy with memorable experiences
• Forging stronger associations and connections between your audience and your brand

But how can brands harness this powerful tool for their value proposition? Let’s explore some different strategies to create truly immersive brand experiences for audiences. 

Map Out Your Strategy

To bring your brand to life through immersive storytelling, you first have to craft exactly what story you want to tell through your event. Once you’ve mapped out what key messages and value you want to deliver to your audience, you then need to consider how to bring an immersive edge to how this is communicated.  

• Embrace non-linear brand narratives: Shake up traditional, linear storytelling structures, and allow your audience to explore the story in various ways, crafting their own unique experiences. This particular strategy creates an event experience that feels dynamic and interactive, rather than static and predictable.
• Remember your pacing: The story should unfold in a way that keeps participants engaged, with peaks of excitement and moments of reflection. Ultimately, you want your event narrative to follow the peak-end rule, leaving attendees with a final wow moment to end their brand experience.
• Select the right format and event tech to elevate your event content: Whether you choose a traditional in-person setup, a fully virtual event, or a hybrid model, your event format should reflect the brand experience you want to create and the event content you want to deliver. For instance, incorporating event tech such as AR or VR can provide immersive experiences that enable your audience to engage with your event content in new and exciting ways. 

Deliver with Impact

With the core framework of your brand narrative and your event format mapped out, you now need to consider how you’re going to deliver this core concept in a way that elevates your narrative. 

• Engage Multiple Senses for a Richer Experience: Incorporate multi-sensory elements such as sounds, music, smells, and tactile objects to truly immerse your audience.
• Boost Interactivity with Gamification: By incorporating elements of gamification, you can encourage attendees to actively participate in the brand narrative. Allow them to piece together different scenarios or solve puzzles that draw them deeper into the story.
• Harness Projection Mapping: This technology allows you to project dynamic visuals onto various surfaces—walls, floors, or even objects—transforming ordinary spaces into stunning, interactive scenes. 

Ready to bring a new dimension to your audience engagement? 

Connect with our expert team of strategic storytellers, and let us develop your bespoke event storytelling strategy as your event partner, engaging your audience through multi-sensory and interactive experiences. 

After joining the business in 2022 a Senior Project Manager, Jonny King shares a recent week in his life as he ventures out of the North to Dubai…

Monday

This week we’re heading to Dubai for a client event. This is a premier incentive event, in other words, a trip to reward our client’s team for hitting certain targets, and generally being superstars. If there’s one thing superstars deserve, it’s non-stop celebrity service as VIP guests in Dubai. But before we step into the world of luxury, we’ve got some last-minute admin to get through. Monday morning starts like most people: in the office. Today the team and I are double-checking everything for the 2903rd time, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.

Then it’s off to sunny Manchester via our ever so glamorous carpool. We’re always conscious about saving emissions where we can, so we normally carshare to our locations or airports where possible. Once we’ve taken off, I savour my in-flight meal of what-was-once-chicken and possibly-potatoes, I manage to watch maybe half a Ghostbusters film before falling asleep.

Tuesday

By Tuesday morning we’ve landed in Dubai, and are heading out of the airport where our Destination Management Company is waiting for us. I love a good DMC. We’ve worked in locations all over the world for over 22 years, so having access to reliable and well connected teams on the ground through our DMCs helps us to unlock those really super exclusive experiences.

Once we get to our hotel, we’ve got the rest of the afternoon to go through our final checks with the DMC before the guests arrive at 5pm. We go over expectations for the week, and finalise all food and drink requirements and preferences for our guests. With 265 people coming, there’s going to be a lot of food and drink!

Before we know it, 5pm hits, and the team that have gone to welcome them from the airport arrive back at the hotel. One guest has left their airpods down the side of their plane seat, so whilst the guests are checking in we arrange for someone to ring the airline to see if there’s anything we can do to find them.

Soon, the guests are joining us at the Hilton Dubai the Palm for a welcome dinner overlooking the Dubai skyline… a standard Tuesday evening tea-time! They’ve had a long travel day, so we don’t keep them up too late, and they head off to bed at about 11pm. After they’ve left, the remaining team has a small catch up meeting and briefing for the next day, before hitting the hay myself at about 12:30am.

Wednesday

With all the guests sufficiently fed on Wednesday morning, the black Mercedes people carriers roll up outside the hotel, ready to take the gang to the Burj Khalifa.

After we whizz everyone up the world’s tallest tower in the world’s fastest lift (Dubai is never one to be outdone), the guests erupt into oohh’s and aahh’s once they see the incredible view. Whilst the guests are instagramming the life out of everything, some of the team split off to different locations across Dubai to do final checks for the week ahead. My job is to head into the desert, and check out the location for our gala dinner.

I know we’ve checked all of the logistics a million times, so I’m more focused on making sure that the branding elements are right. We like to try and get our client’s logos in as many places as possible, and embed our client’s values through as many touch points as possible, so that it really feels like an immersive, branded experience, and not just a company trip.

With everything up to standard, I head back to the hotel to get guests ready to make their way to a premier penthouse nightclub for the evening. The night goes off without a hitch! Even when one of the guests goes over on her ankle on the dancefloor (wearing the tallest heels I’ve ever seen), the team and I jump into problem-solving mode. I quickly grab the on site first-aider, and we get her set up in a booth in the private area with an ice pack on her ankle. She seems to be in pretty high spirits, but we make sure to spend the rest of the evening ferrying her a steady supply of mocktails, food and TLC.

I’ve been up since 6:30 this morning, so I’m heading back to the hotel early whilst my colleagues round up the remaining party people. When I get back, reception let me know that the missing airpods have been found, so I arrange for someone to bring them to the hotel for the next day, before I head to bed at 11.

Thursday

After getting up at 6, I shower and head downstairs to check in with the team about last night. We see ankle woman appear for breakfast in heels, so it looks like she’s doing just fine, but we still give her a strap and bandage, just in case.

On this afternoon’s agenda, we’ve got everyone heading off in groups to take part in their optional activities, including golf in an exclusive resort, a luxury yacht cruise, the afternoon in the Skypool, the Dubai marina zipline, shopping in the Burj Khalifa or heading out in Hero boats. As you can imagine, for a senior project manager who is in charge of the logistics of the event, today could feel like a bit of a nightmare. But that’s why we plan these things super far in advance. Knowing that the logistics and all those moving parts are absolutely nailed means that we can focus on those extra services here and there for our guests.

Friday

Having really set the standard with the events so far this week, we knew we needed to finish the trip in some serious style. To start the day, the guests are off to the desert for a morning of dune bashing, sand boarding, and quad biking.

While the guests are off exploring the desert, we’ve set up a refreshment area, full of fruit, dates, drinks, branded cushions, and even a group of camels that guests could ride. We’d decorated the area with festoon lighting, and even flown in the Menendez Brothers from Ibiza to entertain everyone. When they pulled up in their jeeps after a day of exploring the dunes, their jaws honestly hit the floor, it was incredible!

We celebrated the evening with fire blowers, fire dancers, free flowing drinks, and endless barbecued shawarmas. To top it all off, we finished the night and this incredible week with a belly dancing flash mob, and the most insane drone show I’ve ever seen.

Right now, I think the team are all going through the event high, desperately trying not to think about having to get 250 people on a plane home tomorrow morning. I’m also not thinking about the fact that I’ve only got 3 days in Leeds before another site visit in Cape Town. I’m not bragging, but I’m also not complaining. Okay, maybe I am bragging a bit. But I do have the best job in the world.