I spent a good deal of the day yesterday discussing the summer season of events in the region. Ticket sales have not been good, and it’s not surprising. Who wants to book an outdoor event while the weather has been as poor as it has this spring. Now we’ve seen a turn in the weather, I’m hoping we’ll see an improvement in ticket sales.
But in fact, declining sales have been a trend we’ve recognised over the last five years. When I joined the Trust, we were organising our own large scale events at a number of properties (my favorite was Ian Brown’s comeback at Claremont Landscape Gardens), but we could see that, with every other green space or back garden jumping on the bandwagon, there was a more fragmended demand for such events. After a couple of costly misfortunes at Petworth (where a performer’s sore throat turned a massive profit into a costly loss, for example), and a perception of outdoor event fatigue in our audience (I think its very interesting that Glastonbury didn’t sell out this year), we pulled back from running our own large events. Our current events strategy is to continue with outdoor theatre, where the rewards are not so great but more properties can participate, and at larger venues, hire out sites to events promoters. This means we only get a facility fee of thousands of pounds, rather than a profit of hundreds of thousands, but the risk is also reduced.
This strategy should mean there’s less work to do as well, but yesterday I got involved in concern about one event that so far has had miserable sales. We could say “sod it, we still get our fee,” but even though the event is run by somebody else, there’s still a risk to the National Trust’s reputation iof the event turns out to be a miserable failure.
Fingers crossed for a glorious summer.
