Site visits before an event hire
By James Brown · Updated 11 August 2026 · 5 minute read
Most hires need no site visit: an address, honest access answers and a few photographs plan a standard delivery perfectly well. A visit earns its time when the site is genuinely complicated, multi-day events with routes to agree, difficult access, accessibility routes that must actually work, or a venue nobody has driven before, and then an hour walking it with us converts assumptions into a plan. The substitute for a visit is good information; the enemy is guesswork either way.
Key takeaways
- Photos, a pin and honest access answers cover most ordinary hires.
- Complex events repay an hour's walk: routes, gates, slopes, staging.
- The accessibility route is the one most worth walking in person.
- Whatever the method, surprises on the morning are the thing being purchased away.
What planning actually needs
Every delivery plan answers the same questions: where the transporter stops, what the vehicle rolls off onto, which gates and widths intervene, where the buggy lives overnight, and what ground the working routes cross. For a house, a barn venue or a familiar showground, photographs and a map pin answer all of it without anyone travelling.
The quality of those answers is what matters, per our venue-requirements guide: the gate's actual width, the route's actual surface, said plainly. Guesswork priced cautiously costs more than honesty ever does.
When eyes on the ground pay
Multi-day public events, sites with awkward access, sloped or soft ground that will carry laden vehicles, accessibility routes whose gradients decide whether the ramp buggy genuinely serves, first-time venues for large hires: these repay a visit, because the cost of a misjudged route at scale dwarfs the hour.
A visit walks the delivery point, the storage spot, the working routes and the pinch points, with the venue's own knowledge in the conversation. It ends with a marked map and no adjectives, which is what a plan is.
Working out what this costs for your own event? Tell us the venue and dates and you will have an itemised written quote within one working hour.
Making either method work
Remote planning works when the photographs are of the boring things: the gate with something for scale, the surface close up, the slope viewed side-on, the turning space. Venue staff often have these to hand, and event plans usually exist already for other suppliers.
Visited or not, the output is the same: an agreed plan for delivery, storage and routes that the morning simply executes. That is the entire point, and it is why we ask the tedious questions early rather than improvising expensively at the gate.
Common questions
- Does a site visit cost extra
- Where one is genuinely needed for a substantial hire we treat it as part of doing the job properly, and we will be straight about any case where distance makes that different. The conversation costs nothing either way.
- Can the venue do the walk with you instead of us
- Yes, and often best: venue staff know the ground, the rules and where last year's supplier went wrong. Organiser, venue and us together is the gold standard for a complex site.
- What if the site changes after the plan, mud, works, a new marquee
- Tell us as it happens: plans flex easily in advance and awkwardly on the morning. The plan is a living note, not a ceremony.
Ready to get a price
Tell us about your event and we will send an itemised written quote within one working hour.
