Gated information is a tax. Every enquiry form standing between a planner and a capacity chart costs somebody a week, and every couple who cannot compare deposit terms until they are emotionally committed to a date pays for that asymmetry. So we publish the numbers. And where the numbers are missing or contradict each other, we publish that too.
This is an editorial position rather than a service page, and it is worth setting out plainly, because it explains why our articles read the way they do.
What does gated information actually cost?
Consider the ordinary case. A planner with 100 delegates needs to know which Fiji venues seat them in one room and can house them. On published information, that is a genuinely hard question — so the planner sends eight enquiry emails, waits between two days and two weeks for replies of wildly varying completeness, and then compares figures that are not measured the same way.
Call that a fortnight of elapsed time to answer a question that a table could answer in ninety seconds. Multiply it by every planner and every couple looking at Fiji this year. That is the tax, and Fiji pays it: the planner who cannot get an answer in a week often does not wait, and the country loses the event to a destination whose numbers were easier to find.
The same applies to couples, but worse, because a couple does this once and has no basis for comparison. A resort that will not publish its cancellation scale is not protecting a trade secret. It is making sure you cannot shop the terms.
What did we find when we counted?
We do not want to assert a transparency problem rhetorically, so we counted. Every figure below comes from reading the properties' and suppliers' own published pages, brochures and terms.
| What we looked for | Checked | How many publish it |
|---|---|---|
| Wedding deposit and payment terms | 21 resorts | 3 |
| A wedding date-transfer or postponement clause | 21 resorts | 0 |
| An external-vendor policy with a fee | 30 resorts | 1 |
| An insurance requirement for external suppliers | 30 resorts | 0 |
| A guest-room count alongside meeting capacity | 20 properties | 4 |
| A function-room ceiling height | 20 properties | 1 |
| An FJD ground-transfer rate card | 7 operators | 1 |
| Marquee, staging or AV prices | 9 suppliers | 1 |
| A wedding planning fee or rate structure | 7 planners | 0 |
Read down that right-hand column. On the questions that decide a booking — what you pay, what happens if you move the date, whether your people can sleep where they meet, whether you can bring your own photographer — the Fiji market publishes almost nothing.
And it is not a resourcing problem. Four of those nine rows have exactly one venue or supplier doing it properly, which proves it can be done. The Grand Pacific Hotel publishes a full capacity chart with floor areas and its room count. Shangri-La Yanuca Island publishes ceiling heights, which not one other Fiji venue does. Mana Island Resort publishes a complete wedding contract including force majeure and rooming-list deadlines. Matamanoa publishes what it charges for an outside photographer. Tourist Transport Fiji publishes a full transfer rate card. Tents & Awnings publishes marquee sizes, capacities and prices.
Those six deserve naming, because they are doing the thing the rest of the market says is impossible.
Isn't there a good reason for the enquiry form?
Sometimes, and we should be fair about it.
Rates genuinely move by season, group size and inclusions, and a single published number can mislead. A resort that quotes FJ$180 per delegate for day catering and then meets a group wanting a plated dinner, three coffee breaks and a dietary matrix has published a figure that is worse than useless. Some venues also hold confidential corporate rates they are contractually barred from showing.
All true. None of it explains why a ballroom's banquet capacity is a secret, why a ceiling height is a secret, or why a cancellation ladder cannot be emailed before a deposit is paid. Those are fixed properties of a building and settled terms of a contract. The enquiry form is doing lead capture, not price integrity, and everyone in the trade knows it.
Our position is narrow, then. Publish what is fixed: capacities, dimensions, ceiling heights, room counts, policies, terms, transfer times. Quote what is variable: rates. Almost nobody in Fiji draws that line, and it is the right line.
What do we do when sources conflict?
We publish both figures with both sources and say they conflict. This comes up constantly, and for Fiji venue capacities it is close to routine.
Crowne Plaza Fiji Nadi Bay publishes 900 theatre for its Convention Centre on its own site, while IHG's brand page publishes 1,450 guests for the same room. Both are first-party. We print both. The Sheraton Fiji publishes floor areas on Marriott's venue chart that are demonstrably square-foot values labelled as square metres — one room seating 130 theatre is listed at 1,614.6 sq m — and the same property's meetings page gives a total ten times smaller than its own chart. We say so, tell you to work from the seating figures, and ask you to request a floor plan.
We could quietly pick the more plausible number in each case. We do not, for two reasons. The reader needs to know the figure is disputed before they design a room around it. And a venue that sees its own contradiction in print tends to fix it, which improves the data for everybody.
What do we do when nothing is published?
We write "not published", and we treat that as a finding rather than a gap to fill.
This is the discipline that matters most, because the temptation runs the other way. It would be trivial to estimate a resort's room count from its published villa types, or to infer one property's vendor fee from another's, or to quote a 2019 brochure as though it were current. Every one of those would make the article look more complete and less true.
So the rule we hold to is simple: a gap is better than a guess. If a capacity, price, distance, rating or policy is not sourced, it either appears with the source named or it does not appear. When we cite something expired or third-party — an old brochure on someone else's blog, a schedule aggregator — we label it as such and tell you not to rely on it.
Which sometimes means an article says less than a competitor's. It also means that when we do print a number, you can check it.
What will we not publish?
Four things, so the position is not mistaken for publishing everything we can obtain.
- Rates given to us in confidence. A venue's contracted corporate rate is not ours to share.
- A supplier's private contract, or terms a client sent us rather than the supplier publishing them.
- Any figure we cannot source. Including ones we are fairly sure of.
- Placeholder or unverified directory records. Our directory contains records at different verification levels, and we do not write articles about a venue we cannot confirm exists as described. Our verification method explains the tiers.
We also do not reproduce competitor text. The strategy is out-covering the market, not copying it.
Doesn't this hurt the venues?
We think the opposite, and there is a straightforward argument for it.
A venue whose capacity, policies and terms are findable gets enquiries from planners it can actually serve. A venue that hides them gets a higher volume of enquiries, most of them from people it will disappoint, each one consuming a sales coordinator's afternoon. Transparency is not a concession to the buyer. It is enquiry qualification, and it is free.
There is also a competitive angle for Fiji as a destination. A planner comparing Fiji with Bali, Queensland or Vietnam is comparing how hard each one is to plan. Right now, one honest reading of our count above is that Fiji is harder to plan than it is to deliver — the country runs excellent events and publishes very little about how. That gap is worth closing, and it is not our gap to close alone.
Where we get it wrong
We will, and when we do we correct the article and say what changed.
Today's example, since it happened while we were compiling this: building our planner directory, we found several of our own records filed as wedding planners that are in fact a photographer, a photography and videography studio, a Nadi caterer and a corporate team-building specialist, plus two whose websites no longer resolve. We reclassified them and said so in the article rather than quietly editing the database.
If you run a Fiji venue or supply the industry and we have published something wrong about you, tell us and we will fix it — and if you would rather we published your real capacities, terms and policies instead of noting that you do not, that option is open too. You can claim and manage your listing directly.
The verdict
We are not publishing capacities and terms to embarrass anybody. We are publishing them because the information exists, it is not confidential, and withholding it costs the reader time and costs Fiji business.
The test we apply to every article is whether a planner or a couple could act on it without sending an email first. Sometimes the honest answer is that they cannot, because nobody has published the number — and in that case the most useful thing we can do is tell them exactly what to ask for, and who is not answering.
That is the product. Not a directory of brochures. A record of what is actually known.
Next step
Start with the numbers rather than the enquiry form. Our capacity chart lists every Fiji function space with a published figure, and how to source everything for a Fiji event in one place sets out the sourcing route.
More in this cluster: How MICE Fiji verifies a listing · A directory of Fiji's event and wedding industry · Transport is the thing most Fiji events get wrong.
