Luxury cruise or a thanks in the parking lot?
● From cocktails and a glitzy casino event on a yacht, rounded off with fine dining and late-night drinks, to a budget braai in the company parking lot, corporate year-end bashes this year have ranged from the luxurious to strictly low-budget affairs.
Many companies that did well and made good money are tight with their budgets for the year-end celebration, while smaller companies that had a hard year and went through restructuring and retrenchments reacted by going all-out to spoil and treat their employees who survived the crisis.
This is according to Marisa Scott, owner of Joburg’s Focus Rooms, an upmarket venuebased events co-ordinator business in Sandton. While she didn’t want to disclose her clients, she said they were mostly leading banks, insurance companies, telecommunications providers, and large corporates.
“Last year, companies were surprisingly generous with their budgets. The attitude was ‘we’ve been through lockdown and social distancing, and things are back to normal, so this year we want to go all-out and reward ourselves”, she said. “But this year it has been a completely different story. Corporates — even those that have shown a huge profit — have come to us with tight budgets, wanting something for R200 a head, which is quite frightening,” she said.
But she was aware of some big companies still splurging huge amounts on things like taking all their staff off to Sun City for a show and spending up to R10m on a party.
“Then we’ll have someone come to us and we will quote them something fair for R200,000, and they say they’ll drop to R50,000 and host it in their parking area.” Dirk Beukes owns Teambo, one of the biggest team-building and events operators equipped to host up to 5,000 people at a function. Based in Bloemfontein, the company works all over the country and has branches in Namibia and Mauritius. He agreed there has been a marked drop in extravagant celebrations since last year. “The guys have definitely held back tremendously this year,” he said. “We’ve had clients ask for a quote [and then say]: ‘Please cut your price by 50% or we can’t use you’,” Beukes said. But Barbara ElshoveSchmidt, owner of Team Orange Events, said the situation was vastly different in Cape Town, where corporates were going all-out on celebrations.
“I’ve had 45 year-end functions back to back. Quite a few of the companies say they have had a hard year, been through restructuring and have reduced in size, and so they want to make it up to their staff and really spoil them with things like overnight getaways and special experiences.”
She has organised a beach party for 450 people at Cabo Club, a casino event on a yacht, a murder mystery three-course dinner in a recreated bank-vault setting, weekends in the winelands and masked balls.
“My clients come from all over Africa, and you find now with people working from home and using Zoom, many of them have literally never met in real life. So companies are making an effort to bring everyone together and do something special,” she said.
“There’s a lot of movement in corporate, and group sizes are smaller. They will maybe cut the budget by excluding partner invitations, but they’ll go all-out for their staff. On average, they spend between R1,500 and R1,800 a head excluding drinks, though many will go to as much as R3,000. It’s been an excellent year, and a bumper season.”
The Sunday Times contacted several big corporates about their year-end parties, but all declined to share their plans or budgets.