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Hampton Court Palace – Strategic Sales and Business Development plan
ASSIGNMENT
As Historic Royal Palaces operates some of the most well-known and iconic tourist venues in London including Kensington Palace, Banqueting House in Whitehall, Kew Palace and the Tower of London, we were approached by the Head of Events and Commercial services to create a business development strategy focusing on the ‘private and corporate’ events for Hampton Court Palace
Although located just outside central London we focused our resources on the Garden Room, a banqueting space within the private Walled Gardens. In addition Home Park and 21st Century Gardens at the rear of the Palace used for some of the larger public events. i.e. RHS Flower show, Food Fairs and motorised Concours Salon Prive events.
The assignment involved understanding what additional support could be provided from HRP’s central Business Development and Marketing teams, increased sales and marketing activity from HRP’s catering contractors as well as assessing interest from leading plc companies along the M3 corridor for Hampton Court’s meeting rooms and banqueting space
In conclusion we approached this assignment with a mixture of research, analysis and consultation which included approaching leading Suppliers, M.I.C.E agencies, Wedding planners and Party Organisers
OUTCOMES and CONCLUSIONS
As a result of this ten-day assignment we identified that despite public access to the Palace’s rooms seven days a week, a decision had to be reached on whether the Garden Room with its limited break-out rooms was more suited to the Wedding, as compared to the Conference market as there were a plethora of local venues offering very competitive rates and excellent AV facilities.
Appreciating the Palace regularly attracts a number of ‘high society/celebrity’ weddings, there were two very distinctive markets that would need to be reflected in their future brand, social media and marketing strategy – the London market and the local community, two very different price points.
As with many other distinctive and well-known venues, the Hampton Court Place events team could not just continue to rely on ‘reactive’ enquiries to achieve annual budgets and that if there was a genuine desire to engage with the local corporate market, HRP would have to recruit an additional resource to focus on pure pro-active business development.