How the Covid changed event industry

Hello everybody, five months passed since the lockdown was done in Europe and we can see what Covid did to the event world. So, what has changed by this time?

All information, that will be in this blog is made for the actual situation and official news on government websites regarding Covid situation in Europe.

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I think this is the biggest problem in the whole event industry. The main issue is with the economy of scale. Simply said, in many cases, it is just not economically beneficial to do big scale events, where you need thousands of people, to buy tickets. It means, everything is more expensive if you count all logistic & artist costs divided by the number of people, who come to enjoy the event. The tickets for the same event, but with 10 times fewer people, would have to be 10 times more expensive and nobody would buy them. Actually, here belong all concerts, expos, sports events, Christmas eves for big corporates or events for launching a new product, where you need a big audience to get to know the product. For Tron shows, these events are the majority of our jobs.

When the client books us for their show, we usually fly to a place, where the event is held, because it is the fastest way. Nowadays, the problem is, that airplanes are not 100% reliable because flights can be changed or canceled very easily. This is not good for us, because we usually fly in a tight schedule. It is normal to come in the morning, have a rehearsal around lunch, the event in the evening, and fly back early the next morning. If the first flight is rescheduled or canceled, there is a possibility of not getting to the place of the event on time. If the flight back is rescheduled, there is a problem of taking responsibility for paying all expenses we spent (food, sleepover…), until we can fly back home. Usually, we fly as a group of 6 or 8 people and buying extra lunches or dinners can be a lot of money. Not counting extra nights if this would be the case. Like this, all the company profits can be easily erased.

This is a unique situation depending on where you are based and what is the current situation in the state, where you plan to travel. Right now the number of “red” countries, where you need to pass a few days of quarantine after arrival, is increasing. Or you need to wait at least a few days until you get the covid test done and the results are negative. The main issue is that before the pandemic, we made events from 1 to 3 days in total. Now, the minimum time required for the event is 6 days of quarantine, 1-3 days of event + 6 days of quarantine in Slovakia. It’s 13-15 days in an optimistic scenario. The longer one would be that you wait 10 days in the country of the event, perform, and wait for another 10 days in your home country, which can be 29-31 days in total. Now imagine somebody would have to pay for a hotel room, food 3 times per day and some money for dancers spent time. The event would be 2 – 3 times more expensive than before the pandemic. I do not even count, that it would be much more difficult to find dancers, who would like to spend 30 days on an event, which used to take 3-4 days.

Despite all economic circumstances, health is still the most important thing for everyone. The risk of getting infected is much higher compared to the pre-pandemic situation. For this reason, it could be potentially harder to find dancers, who are willing to go to the specific countries depending on their pandemic situation. Also, we need to keep in mind, that if someone gets infected in a foreign country, the medical treatment abroad can be much more complicated and more difficult from the economical point of view too.

When we discussed how we can protect ourselves in the company, we decided, that the safest way is to get the tests done after arriving at the airport. There is a test, which will tell you the results in 3 hours. Again, we need to think of the fact, that these tests are not for free. A test for one person costs 120 euros, so for a group of 8 people, the tests can cost nearly one thousand euros. This extra expense needs to be covered as well.

As you have read about all these conditions, you see it is almost impossible to do the shows as we used to. You can see, that this situation makes the event industry (and everyone who works there) suffer and although we try hard to find a way how to make everybody safe and decrease the expenses to a minimum, there are still things we cannot change. We just hope the situation gets better soon, so we can meet at some amazing events again.

If you have any questions or things to share, do not hesitate to contact me here!