Marquee hire pitfalls

I’m very wary about coming across as a smug know-it-all in this blog. I don’t claim to know everything about marquees but I know a reasonable amount. I don’t claim to have all the answers to your start up marquee hire business, but as I’ve been there I can point you in the right direction. To illustrate the point of my non-know-it-all status I’ll try to remember a few of our errors now and again:

We were brought in to erect a marquee for an evening presentation at a hotel/spa one day, the marquee was to be erected on one side of their car park and had to be up in the morning, down in the evening.

Now marquees going up on a hard standing are a pain in the backside. You need to either drill in to the car park (not allowed), hold it down with weights or use long guy ropes down to a nearby patch of grass.

We thought we were being pretty shrewd by lining up the marquee along the edge of the car park so we could knock stakes in the thin patch of grass on one side – hey presto we only need weights along the front.

The presentation was a success and we’d nearly taken it all down when it came to taking the stakes out -upon lifting a stake out one of our lads heard a loud ‘hissing’ noise and smelt gas! Showing remarkable coolness he dropped the stake back in the hole before RUNNING out the marquee.

Yes we’d gone through the main gas pipe.

That fed the large hotel.

That was just about to seat 120 people for an evening meal.

Oh crap.

In actual fact we came out of it quite lightly. We paid for the British Gas emergency call out to repair the leak and we refunded half the hire charge. If we’d been pressed to compensate the 120 diners we’d have been in trouble.

So what’s to learn from this? MAKE SURE on your terms and conditions you have a line saying ‘there are no underground drains, cables, pipes or other hidden services on the site selected’ and ‘ cannot be held responsible for damage to such items unless informed in writing previously’ and only take a booking with a signature agreeing to these t’s & c’s.

If you buy one of our marquees we include a copy of our old t’s & c’s for you to use.

Thanks for reading

Spencer.