The venue decides more of your budget than the venue quote admits

A venue's photographs show you the room empty and lit for a wedding brochure. Your programme tells you what has to happen in that room: how many people need to see a screen at once, how sound will travel when three sessions run in parallel, and how quickly two hundred people can get from a keynote to a coffee break without a bottleneck at the door. Judge the venue against the second thing.

Capacity is a layout, not a number

A venue that seats 200 is quoting one specific layout, usually theatre style with rows of chairs and no tables, because that is the layout that produces the biggest number. The same room might hold 120 in cabaret style with round tables, or fewer again once your lectern, screen, mixing desk and a ramp for wheelchair access are in it. Ask the venue for capacity in the layout you actually intend to use, with your AV setup already placed in the room. If they can only give you the theatre-style figure, treat it as the ceiling.

Room shapes that kill sessions

A long, narrow room forces people at the back into a poor sightline and a worse listening position, and a room with structural pillars down the middle blocks the screen from an entire section regardless of how many chairs fit. Low ceilings make a full room feel airless by mid-afternoon, and a room next to a kitchen, a bar or another session tends to leak noise through a wall that looked solid on the site visit. None of this shows up in a floor plan drawn to scale. It shows up when you stand in the room and look from the seats you'd actually be selling.

"Seats 200" versus "works for 200 people all day"

A room can hold 200 chairs and still fail a full-day event, because a full day adds requirements a single photograph never captures: enough toilets nearby that a break doesn't turn into a queue, breakout space for the conversations that happen outside the session, and a route from the room to catering that doesn't cross the flow of people trying to get in. The Equality Act 2010 places a duty on organisers to make reasonable adjustments, and a venue only meets that duty in practice if step-free routes, an accessible toilet and a quiet space are close to the main room. The Equality and Human Rights Commission publishes worked examples of what counts as reasonable, and it's worth checking these against the specific room before you sign.

Walk the route your attendees will actually walk, at the times they'll actually walk it, before you commit. A worked floor plan for a typical single-track day is a useful thing to compare a venue's room against; see the worked examples and templates for one, and the accessibility and codes of conduct guide for what a proper accessibility audit of a venue covers beyond step-free access.

A venue's standard package usually covers the room, a house PA system and a lectern microphone, and sometimes a screen or a fixed projector. Everything past that, from a second microphone for the person asking a question at the back to the encoder that pushes your programme to a remote audience, is a separate line and often a separate supplier. Working out which is which before you sign is what keeps the AV invoice from arriving as a surprise.

What a venue quote usually includes, and what it quietly excludes

The house system is built for one microphone at a fixed point. If your programme includes a fireside chat, a workshop with breakout groups, or any session where more than one person needs to be heard at once, you will need extra radio mics, and those come from a separate hire line. A projector that looks fine for a slide deck often struggles with video, and a screen sized for a small meeting room reads badly from the back row of a 200-seat conference layout. Ask the venue to confirm what is fixed and included, and what is bookable at extra cost, before you compare quotes across venues.

The in-house AV clause worth reading twice

Some venues require you to use their in-house AV supplier, or charge a fee if you bring your own. This works the same way as a catering corkage fee: it protects the venue's existing supplier relationship, and it removes your ability to shop around for the recording, streaming or lighting work that a general AV hire company might do more cheaply. Ask directly whether the AV contract is exclusive, and if it is, get a quote from that supplier before you commit to the venue.

Wi-fi: what "we have wifi" doesn't tell you

Venue wifi is usually provisioned for occasional guest use. Ask for the actual bandwidth available on the day, whether it is dedicated to your event or shared with anything else happening in the building, and whether the venue can guarantee it. If your event is running as a hybrid event, streaming out reliably depends on upload speed specifically, which is a different figure from the download speed venues tend to quote.

Power: the sockets you don't see until the site visit

Catering equipment, stage lighting, laptop charging points and any recording or streaming kit all draw power, and older venues in particular were not wired with a 200-person conference in mind. Extension leads and additional circuits sometimes need sign-off from an electrician before the venue will allow them, which is a cost and a lead time that rarely appears on the original quote. Walk the room with your AV supplier, and ask where the power actually is.

Where accessibility depends on the AV setup

Live captioning (CART) needs a clean audio feed from the AV desk, arranged with the AV supplier in advance, and a hearing loop needs to be built into the room. These are decisions that belong in the AV brief. The accessibility and codes of conduct guide covers what the Equality Act 2010 duty to make reasonable adjustments means in practice for a live event.

A worked AV and power budget, alongside the other costs covered in this guide, is set out in the worked examples and templates section.

"We can cater for dietary requirements" is a line every venue and every caterer will say, because almost none of them will say no to a booking over it. What it actually means, tested against a real conference of 150 to 300 people, is usually narrower: a vegetarian and a vegan option, a gluten-free option, and a willingness to remove nuts from a dish if asked in advance. It rarely means a system for collecting requirements accurately, checking them against what's served, and handling the requests that don't fit the standard four boxes, such as a severe allergy, a halal or kosher requirement, or a combination of restrictions in one person.

What the standard line covers, and what it doesn't

Most catering contracts assume dietary requirements sort into a handful of categories: vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free. A caterer quoting for these has almost certainly done it before and will manage it without difficulty. The gap opens with anything that requires active handling: a nut allergy severe enough that cross-contamination matters, a request that only becomes known the morning of the event, or a delegate whose need doesn't map onto any of the standard labels. Since the Food Information (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2019 (often called Natasha's Law) came into force, pre-packed food sold on site has to carry full ingredient and allergen labelling, but a buffet assembled in-house is not automatically covered in the same way. Ask the venue directly how allergen information is handled for food that isn't pre-packed, because the answer tells you whether they have a system or a form of words.

Briefing a caterer so the claim is testable

A dietary requirement collected on the registration form is only useful if it reaches the kitchen in a form the kitchen can act on. The brief to the caterer should specify:

• How requirements will be collected (registration form field)
• A cut-off date after which late requests are handled as exceptions, and what happens to a request that arrives after that date
• How each dish will be labelled at the point of service.
• Who at the venue is responsible for briefing kitchen and front-of-house staff on the day, and whether that person will be on site during service
• What happens if a delegate's need isn't met by the standard menu: is there a fallback plate, and who prepares it

This is a programme decision as much as a catering one. If your speaker list or attendee base includes people you know have specific requirements, ask about the arrangements before you sign. A conversation two weeks out about a severe allergy is a different conversation from one held on the morning of the event.

What doing it properly costs against doing it badly

Catering done badly, one sad pre-made wrap set aside on a separate table, usually looks cheaper on the quote because it adds almost nothing to the per-head price. Catering done properly, with a labelled, actively managed dietary offer covering the standard categories plus a process for exceptions, typically adds a modest premium to the per-head catering cost as of 2024, driven mainly by the extra kitchen labour and labelling. The variables that move the figure are the proportion of delegates flagging a requirement, whether the venue's kitchen is in-house or an external caterer working in an unfamiliar space, and how late requirements are allowed to come in. Get the caterer to itemise the dietary offer separately on the quote, so you can see what you're actually paying for.

The cost of getting it wrong doesn't show up on the catering invoice. It shows up as a delegate standing at an empty table during the lunch break, and for a first-time organiser that single moment tends to do more damage to how the event is remembered than almost anything on the programme. For the wider list of costs that catch first-time organisers by surprise, see Venues, Catering and the Costs Nobody Budgets For, and for the questions worth putting to a venue before signing, see the venue contract checklist elsewhere in this guide.

A venue quote covers the room. A catering quote covers the food. Neither one covers most of what a conference actually needs on the day, and the gap between those two numbers and the real total is where first-time organisers usually get caught out. The line items below rarely appear on a first draft of the budget, and each one is worth pricing properly before you sign anything.

Signage and wayfinding

Delegates need to find registration, the right room for the right session, the toilets and the fire exits, and a venue's own signage is usually generic. Printing directional signs, a registration desk banner and room-name boards is a separate cost from the room hire, and it scales with the number of floors and rooms you're using. Ask the venue what signage they already have fixed in place before you commission your own.

Insurance

Most venues make public liability insurance a condition of the contract, meaning you cannot use the space without a minimum level of cover in place, and that cover is arranged separately from anything the venue itself provides. Event cancellation insurance is a further, optional layer that protects the money already committed to deposits if the event has to be pulled. Whether you need it, and at what level, is a question for an insurance broker rather than this guide, but it is a question to ask before the contract is signed, not after.

First aid cover

Whether an event needs a qualified first aider on site depends on the size of the crowd, the nature of the activity and what the venue's own licence requires, and the venue's events team or health and safety adviser is the right place to ask. The Purple Guide, the industry reference for event safety, sets out how organisers typically assess this. Some venues include first aid cover as part of their package; many do not, and treat it as a separate booking with its own lead time.

Cloakroom

A cloakroom sounds like a convenience rather than a cost, until a venue charges per coat or bills a flat staffing fee for someone to run it, and that fee is rarely mentioned until you ask directly. For a winter conference with an all-day programme, this is worth pricing in.

Extra power

The power a room is wired for is usually enough for lighting and a projector. Extra distribution boards or additional sockets are typically charged per outlet, per day, by the venue directly, and an external AV supplier will separately charge for running power drops to where the equipment actually sits. Confirm with your AV supplier what power the rig needs before you ask the venue what it can provide.

Overnight storage

If your event runs over more than one day, or if an exhibition stand and AV kit need to stay in the room overnight, some venues charge a daily storage fee for anything left in the space outside your booked hours. Others include it without asking. This is a specific line to raise in the contract conversation.

The invoice that arrives after the event

The final bill often differs from the one you agreed, and the difference usually comes from three places: catering numbers reconciled against a guaranteed minimum rather than your actual headcount, corkage or bar spend that ran over the agreed minimum, and any damage or extended cleaning charged after the room is checked. Ask the venue, before you sign, exactly how final numbers are reconciled and what evidence they provide if a charge is disputed. A sample budget that lays these categories out against real bands is worked through on the worked examples and templates page, and how these extra costs feed into what you charge for a ticket is covered on the ticket pricing page.