The promise is a short one and it lives on our delivery page: if adverse weather, a vehicle failure, illness or anything else stops us getting your event to you, you hear about it as early as we can manage and the booking is refunded in full. This post went up in June 2020, when every event company in the country was learning what disruption could do, and everything below is how we kept bookings alive through it.
What we could still do under the restrictions
June 2020 was the month the covid-secure work started properly. One of the first jobs was a covid-secure testing area for a large client, built from marquees and a delivery and set-up of more than 100 tensa barriers. Around the same time we began supplying safe working environments for businesses that had no choice about staying open, and Amazon was among them. The kit list grew through that summer and autumn: pop-up shelters and mini marquees, easy-clean canteen tables, crowd control barriers, road cones, tensa belt barriers and the signage to run one-way systems around them. The lists themselves were built around the working-safely guidance published on Gov.uk, the same document most site managers were working from. The jobs came from retail, factories, plants and warehouses, any workplace that had to keep running with 2m between people. Most of that kit could go out same-day or next-day, because it lives in our own stock, and it could be hired long term or bought outright with discounts for the longer hires, which is what most of those sites wanted: a barrier run that stays up for a whole season.
Why the promise holds
It holds because of how the business is put together. Around 95% of the equipment is owned by us, so there's no third-party hire firm sitting between the booking and the kit. The transport is ours too, and the office phone is answered by the people who plan the loads, which means news of a problem comes from the person who can do something about it. Public liability cover runs at £5 million on every hire, the inflatables and marquees are inspected annually, and insurance certificates are available to any client who asks for them. We'd been trading since 1999 by the time the pandemic arrived, so the fleet, the warehouse routines and the customer contacts were already in place. It didn't ask us to invent a way of working, it asked us to lean on the one we had.
When the events trade stopped, the stock went into secure storage and the office kept answering enquiries by phone and email through the whole period. That mattered more than it sounds: when dates reopened, postponed bookings went back in the diary one by one, and clients who had spent a year unable to plan anything found the same voice on the end of the line as in 2019.
What we can't do anything about
Weather and a gearbox failure at six in the morning aren't things anyone can promise away, and we don't pretend otherwise. What we can promise is the shape of the response: early warning from the office, a genuine attempt to move the booking to another date first, and a full refund if the date dies. If one item can't run, the crew will look at what the site and the conditions will allow and offer it before they pack up. That was the approach long before 2020 and it hasn't changed since.
Booking with the promise in place
The covid-secure kit is still in the fleet, marquees and shelters included, and the same logistics that ran it then run every booking now. If you want the terms in writing before you commit, the delivery page carries them in full, and the office on 0114 345 0135 will walk you through what they mean for your specific date. Standard delivery covers Sheffield, Rotherham, Doncaster, Barnsley, Worksop and Chesterfield, with UK mainland coverage for everything further out.
<< Return to news