How long should a venue site inspection take?

Budget 90 minutes to two hours per property for a conference of 100 or more, and insist on walking it in delegate order rather than following the sales route. Anything under an hour is a tour, not an inspection, and you will leave without the back-of-house answers that decide whether the event works.

What should you photograph during a site inspection?

The things nobody sends you: the loading door with a tape measure in frame, the ceiling with its lowest obstruction, the power outlets and distribution boards, the kerbside drop-off, the accessible route, the breakout doors and the view from the back row. Photograph the problems, not the ballroom.

Who should attend a site inspection?

At minimum you and the venue's banqueting or conference services manager, not only sales. Ask for the chief engineer or maintenance lead for ten minutes on power and rigging, and the executive chef or banquet chef for ten minutes on kitchen capacity. Those two conversations resolve more risk than the rest of the visit.

Should you tell the venue what you are checking?

Yes, and send this checklist ahead. A venue given the list in advance arrives with the floor plans, rigging limits and capacity charts ready, which uses the visit for verification rather than discovery. A venue that cannot produce them with notice has told you something useful.

What is the single most overlooked check?

Banquet kitchen capacity against your largest seated service. A ballroom that seats 400 does not guarantee a kitchen that can plate 400 hot courses inside 20 minutes, and nobody volunteers the constraint. Ask for the plating capacity and the distance from kitchen to room in metres.

How do you turn a site inspection into a decision?

Score every venue on the same rows. Transfer the forty answers into one comparison matrix the same evening, while the detail is fresh, and record a gap as a gap rather than leaving a blank. The venue that wins should win on documented rows, not on how good the lunch was.

The Site Inspection Checklist

A site inspection is forty checks, walked in the order a delegate experiences the building — kerbside, lobby, plenary, breakouts, back of house, kitchen, rooms, then risk. Work it in that sequence and the report writes itself on the flight home. Work it in the venue's sequence and you will see the ballroom four times and the loading dock never.

Print this, send a copy to the venue ahead of the visit, and collect the evidence column as you go.

1–6: Arrival and access

#	Check	Evidence to collect
1	Kerbside drop-off: how many coaches abreast, and is it undercover?	Photo of the forecourt; coach turning circle
2	Distance from drop-off to registration, in metres and in steps	Pace it; note any stairs
3	Accessible route from vehicle to plenary without stairs	Photo of the ramp or lift; lift internal dimensions
4	Registration area footprint and natural queueing direction	Floor plan with your desk layout drawn on it
5	Signage positions and whether the venue permits its own branding	Written policy on banners, adhesives and free-standing signage
6	Where 200 bags go if arrival precedes check-in	Named secure room, lockable, with its capacity

7–14: The plenary room

#	Check	Evidence to collect
7	Capacity in your set-up, not the brochure's	Capacity chart for theatre, banquet, cabaret and cocktail, signed off
8	Floor area in m² and the room's true usable shape	Dimensioned floor plan
9	Ceiling height at its lowest point, not its highest	Measurement plus a photo of the lowest obstruction
10	Pillars, and what they block from the back row	Photo from the last seat you would sell
11	Rigging: permitted points, point loads, and who signs them off	Written rigging limits from the venue's engineer
12	Blackout quality, and whether natural light can be fully killed	Photo at the hour of your keynote
13	Power: outlet positions, phases available, distance to the board	Photo of the distribution board; phase confirmation
14	Noise bleed from adjoining rooms, pools, bars and roads	Stand in the room with the air conditioning running

If a venue cannot produce items 7, 9, 11 and 13 in writing, nothing you plan on top of them is safe. Capacity figures in particular move between a venue's own documents — the same ballroom routinely appears with two different banquet numbers in a brochure and a capacity chart — so get the figure confirmed for your date and your set-up.

15–20: Breakouts and delegate flow

#	Check	Evidence to collect
15	Number of breakout rooms available on your dates	Written hold list, not an inventory list
16	Walking time from plenary to the furthest breakout	Time it; note whether the route is outdoors
17	Whether the route is covered end to end	Photo of the gaps
18	Catering break positions and whether they create a bottleneck	Floor plan with station positions
19	Toilet count within 60 seconds' walk of the plenary	Count them
20	Prayer, quiet and parents' room provision	Named rooms

21–27: Back of house

#	Check	Evidence to collect
21	Loading door height and width	Photograph it with a tape measure in frame
22	Truck access: largest vehicle that can reach the dock	Written confirmation
23	Route from dock to room — lifts, thresholds, turns, ramps	Walk it pushing something heavy
24	Lift dimensions and weight limit if the room is not at grade	Plate photo
25	Bump-in and bump-out windows, and overtime charges	Written times and rates
26	Generator: coverage, automatic or manual transfer, test schedule	Engineer's confirmation
27	Internet: committed bandwidth, wired options, concurrent device load	Written figure, not "high speed wifi"

See power reliability and generator backup and internet and bandwidth at Fiji venues for what good answers look like.

28–32: Food and beverage

#	Check	Evidence to collect
28	Banquet kitchen plating capacity for one hot course	A number of covers, from the chef
29	Distance and route from kitchen to the plenary	Walk it; note stairs and outdoor sections
30	Dietary, halal, kosher and allergy handling	Written process and separation arrangements
31	Outside caterer and outside beverage policy, with fees	Written policy
32	Where a 300-person cocktail function goes if it rains	Named indoor space with its seated and standing capacity

Check 28 is the one that quietly fails events. A room that seats 400 does not imply a kitchen that can plate 400 hot mains in twenty minutes — see banquet kitchen capacity, the constraint nobody checks.

33–36: Accommodation

#	Check	Evidence to collect
33	Rooms available on your dates, by type, as a held block	Written block with release dates
34	Inspect a standard room, not a suite	Photo of the standard inventory
35	Accessible rooms: how many, and where in the property	Count and location
36	Walking distance from the furthest room to the plenary	Pace it

37–40: Risk and compliance

#	Check	Evidence to collect
37	Evacuation plan, assembly point, and capacity of the muster area	Plan document
38	Nearest medical facility and realistic response time	Named facility; see healthcare and emergency services by region
39	Insurance, public liability and indemnity position	Certificate of currency
40	Cancellation, attrition and force majeure terms	The clauses themselves, before you negotiate

How to use it on the day

Three rules make the difference.

Walk it in delegate order. Insist on arriving as a delegate would, at the hour your delegates will, and finish in the back of house. Sales teams naturally start at the best view.

Collect evidence, not impressions. Every row above has a document, a photograph or a measurement attached. "They seemed confident about rigging" is not an answer you can build a stage on.

Fill the matrix the same evening. Transfer all forty answers into the Fiji venue comparison matrix before dinner, while you can still remember which property had the covered walkway. Record gaps as gaps.

The five answers that decide it

If you leave with only five, make them these: plenary capacity in your set-up, banquet kitchen plating capacity, loading door dimensions, committed bandwidth, and the named wet-weather space with its capacity. A venue that answers all five in writing is a venue that has run your event before.

Next step: read what a Fiji site inspection should cover for how to structure the trip itself across precincts, then put the answers to work in the Fiji conference RFP template and the event risk assessment template for Fiji. Venues to inspect first include Sheraton Fiji, Hilton Fiji, InterContinental Fiji, Grand Pacific Hotel Suva and Tanoa International Hotel. The hub is Fiji for business events, and capacity lists start at /capacities.