EC PAPERS NOVEMBER 2017

7

Liberating Arts for less than an extra £10k on top of what we had already spent and establishing a base from which to develop a GFTU cultural programme. After consultation with the GFTU President and Vice President the Gen Sec decided on Monday 16 th October to go ahead with this 1-day version of Liberating Arts with much reduced ticket prices. The turn-around was completed by the Producer in 3 days and by Thursday 19 th refunds had been completed and a new FB marketing campaign launched. Within 2 days we were back at our figure of 80+ tickets booked and bookings continued to rise. By the date of the event itself we had sold out all 200 available tickets. Red Meet: Red Meet were a third party hotel booking agency employed by the GFTU to book accommodation for both artists/presenters and for delegates. It was important to try to get a single occupancy rate for the artists/ performers/presenters of £50 per person per night as we were paying for rooms for over 70 people, many for 2 nights. Even this discounted rate gave us a hotel bill in excess of £6k. The standard rate in Exeter of £85+ per person per night would add at least £2.5k to our costs. Up until mid-September Red Meet seemed to be fulfilling their contract adequately. They were slow to respond to emails and phone calls and didn’t seem quite on top of things but there were no real reasons for concern. During the TUC conference and unbeknown to the GFTU Gen Sec or the Producer, an email had been sent to Red Meet telling them Liberating Arts had been cancelled. In turn they had cancelled all the hotel rooms. Subsequently realising the event had not in fact been cancelled they tried to rebook the rooms but now could only get a rate of £65 per person per night and to secure this rate the bill would have to be paid in advance, that day. So a week before our nominated deadline we were faced with Introductory conference calls were had with Red Meet as early as March 2017 and an initial performers list was sent to them in May.

7 Producer’s Report 06/11/2017