Event Gurus

Organising events, congresses, conferences entails having everything in the right place at the right time. In order to execute successful events, Middle East based organisers are juggling with a variety of logistical challenges.

Imagine the logistics involved in the grandiose opening of the Atlantis hotel last month. The organisers of that event must be very pleased with themselves, though, since everything went according to plan.

For things to run like clock work, planning is key. Vishal D’Souza, Director – Operations, MCI Middle East says, “When a client approaches us for a congress, we have what we call at MCI a Product Organigram. This is a programme showing the client the different levels/components of services within a project. It’s just like setting up a new business.”

Vishal D’Souza, Director – Operations, MCI Middle East

MCI’s modus operandi in creating successful congresses such as FIATA is getting an idea of what the client has been used to in the past. D’Souza says, “We need to understand what they’ve done in the past, how have they operated or who they were working with and what was the structure being used previously to see if they are comfortable with the existing structure or if we need to create something new for them. Our focus here is if it is a new client, we do not want to do things too differently than what he/she is used to in order for the client to have the comfort level with us.”

MCI’s key focus is doing business as a professional congress organiser (PCO) although events also are very much part of the family as congresses have a number of social events and parties all linked into them. Clients usually contact MCI a year or six months in advance. MCI then sits with them to learn the way the client wants the congress to be executed presenting them with a breakdown of costs depending on the number of delegates expected to attend.

Activities typically executed by MCI when it commits to creating a congress include: sending invitations to delegates, organising registration of delegates with the appropriate number of MCI staff, pre-event communication, hotel procurement and management, onsite logistics, VIP and speaker management, sponsorship issues, the actual exhibition, creative production, transportation, social events and technical tours.

Challenges All of these components require a large percentage of logistical back up. Having extensive international and local experience, the challenges MCI faces are related to contracting of hotels/venues. “There are a lot of congresses that are keen to come to this region but there are no congress centres,” says D’Souza. The Dubai International Convention Centre (revamped in 2003 for the IMF) is the only dedicated exhibition centre in Dubai. “If you look at their calendar of events, there is no chance of getting availability for the next four to five years,” he continues.

But there’s hope. “There is a new convention centre coming up at the Jebel Ali airport, the Dubai airport free zone is planning something, so there is a lot of scope for conferences yet to come,” says D’Souza.

Challenges are many in the area of contracting. “Clients are not used to having to come to this part of the world and booking about 300 rooms in a hotel one year in advance and having to pay a 50 per cent deposit of the total cost to book their rooms because this doesn’t happen in Europe. The inventory of hotels in Europe is so large that hotels benefit when you make a large group booking as for that period of time they don’t have to worry about selling rooms because they are usually not running on full occupancy.”

Procurement is a way out of this. By acquiring long term contracts with hotels, transportation companies, F&B, catering and supplies reduces costs as well as establishes a two way benefit scheme.

The glamour quotient The Talent Brokers have been around for 30 years in Dubai. Having organised a number of concerts in Dubai and other regions, they know organising events like the back of their hands. Padma Coram, Managing Director, The Talent Brokers, says, “Organising events such as the ones we do is all about trial and error. I don’t think any textbook can give you the answer for it. Managing logistics is something you have to experience your self and be consciously doing what we do. You need to be passionate and know your territory very well. It doesn’t matter if you’re the biggest promoter in London, you come to Dubai and everything is different. People are different, the location is different, permissions and procedures are different. Also, just because an event works in India it might not work here, you really need to know your land, you need to know the pulse, the heart of the project.”

From left: Padma Coram, Managing Director, The Talent Brokers with Luciano Pavarotti and HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai and in the other picture with husband Richard Coram and Indian actress Kareena Kapoor

The biggest event organised by The Talent Brokers logistics wise was the Power Boat Race concert featuring Amr Diab way back in 1988. Being a free concert, Coram says they had about 60,000 people who attended that concert. “It was huge, probably a majority of the UAE population at the time came for it!”

Having concerts for 80,000 to 90,000 plus audiences in Dubai is simply not possible she says. A large concert with such capacities can happen in India but never here. “Last year, we had about 15,000 to 17,000 people who came to watch Elton John live in Abu Dhabi.”

Coram’s team is well-versed with organising such large open air concerts because having the hard earned experience helps in quick organisation. “It’s like working on a ready template but with different subjects each time,” she says, “we’ve done it so often.” So although she doesn’t have a permanent team, she has what she calls a permanent part-time team of companies to whom she contracts these tasks.

“It’s like setting up a city for a day and then taking it apart. We need to construct the entire stage area with the green room, VIP Lounge, refreshments are (sometimes artistes come with 200 people of their own and organising the logistics for their needs such as transportation, entourage, their own private jets and cargo planes has to be arranged), seating area, toilets. I often describe my job as that of a construction worker or toilet maker as we even have to make the drainage for the toilets,” she chuckles.

Challenges “In this country, my biggest challenge is a lack of a venue, lack of infrastructure, lack of a common location, traffic. Everything to do with an event that takes us all the time to manage such as facilities, generators, electricity that we don’t have because there is no permanent location. It’s my biggest challenge because we spend 90 per cent of our time constructing these facilities for a concert when we have to concentrate on other things such as the show itself. And, trust me, that is an enormous amount of work on its own. We seem to be concentrating on creating infrastructure and facilities of the country which we needn’t have to be doing,” she says. She likens her job to building an entire theatre to show one movie for one night and then taking it apart.

“After an event is over, we get blamed for the facilities or lack of them such as parking which wasn’t suitable or the traffic getting in and out of the venue. We aren’t responsible for that and shouldn’t be the ones to be blamed,” she says. “Unless there’s a venue, event logistics in the region will continue to be a nightmare. The venue cannot be built by a private company it has to be arranged for by the government. The way I see it, organising logistics for a country is about thinking of the future, it’s not about satisfying the needs of the present but anticipating the needs of the nation 70 to 80 years from now. It’s about respecting the people who reside in a country and envisioning their needs in advance, that is my take on planning logistics of a country.”