The British Insurance Brokers’ Association (BIBA) is the UK’s trade association for insurance brokers. The association’s annual conference and exhibition is ‘the meeting place for the insurance industry’ and Manchester Central feels like home to the organising team!
"The event has grown year on year at Manchester Central but in 2016 we broke records – attracting more than 7,000 attendees and nearly 4,500 registered brokers over two days.
The main objective of the BIBA event is to encourage networking and Manchester Central perfectly accommodates this; the variety of room sizes and configurations available allows us to coordinate fringe and evening activities so that delegates can find other insurance professionals to network with throughout the entire event.
Manchester Central’s city centre location further boosts this as we’re able to create a wider conference environment within the hotels that surround the venue and provide endless out of hours networking opportunities in the many restaurants and bars on its doorstep!
Using the full site at Manchester Central allows us to create the optimum delegate flow due to the venue’s versatility; driving delegates through the exhibition to access the main conference in the purpose-built auditorium and seminar sessions in the Charter Suite.
This versatility also allowed us to introduce a new feature last year, the Young Broker Day microconference. The Cobden Rooms were perfect as we were able to run a series of theatre-style presentations and use the remaining space for a networking reception.
Being self-contained but still on the doorstep of the exhibition was a huge plus and the flexibility of the partitions enabled us to run everything in the same area.
In 2016, we had a particularly high profile VIP speaker attending, which meant that we had to introduce completely new security procedures and checks. Manchester Central’s experience in delivering high-profile events was second to none, with the team advising on the best measures and putting them in place without a hitch; taking any added stress away from the organising team.
Additionally, the event has an enormous amount of vehicle traffic on build and breakdown days but detailed planning by the traffic and security team at Manchester Central provides effective procedures to ensure a smooth and safe build and breakdown.
Each and every team member at Manchester Central is proactive, friendly, helpful, efficient, polite and fast to react – making the whole team a delight to work with year after year.
With a number of years’ experience working at the venue, we have come to expect a very high level of service and the team has never let us down. The team have a great skill in making us and our visitors feel very welcome and there is absolutely no ‘them and us’ – we all work together and it feels they have as much interest, investment and pride in our event as we do.
The people really are the stand out feature. They all play a major part in the success of the event and we know we’re in very capable hands when working at Manchester Central!