How Our European Events Could Be Affected by Brexit

Posted by on May 30, 2017 in Blog

Audio Visual Company, Audio Visual Company Coventry, Audio Visual Company West Midlands, Conference Production Company, Conference Production Company Coventry, Brexit

This month we packed up our equipment and headed over to sunny Geneva to support a client’s awards evening. Exciting times!

However as Switzerland is outside of the EU, things aren’t as straightforward for us when it comes to delivering AV production.

With any movement of services/kit in and out of non-EU countries it is classed as exporting/importing. This requires us to apply for an official exportation document called a Carnet. You may have seen us talk about this before in our EU Referendum blog post.

We are issued with a Carnet by The London Chamber of Commerce once we have informed them of every single piece of AV kit we are transporting. That’s, EVERY single piece of kit! As you can imagine, itemising the make, model, serial number and quantity of two tonnes of AV kit is very time consuming. It also costs us over £500 for the production of the Carnet.

Finally before we loaded our truck we have had to individually number all our pieces of kit from the numbering system on our Carnet document,. It was a busy old day to say the least!

Audio Visual Company, Audio Visual Company Coventry, Audio Visual Company West Midlands, Conference Production Company, Conference Production Company Coventry

Now to be honest the event in Geneva was for a great client and our crew quite enjoy seeing different places around Europe, so we’re not complaining. However if free movement ceases under any future Brexit agreement then this could become the norm for us when delivering events throughout Europe. This additional cost and time could make us less competitive, to local European AV companies. Let’s see what happens.

Saying that, although cost is important, our clients tend to choose us because we’re good at what we do (their words not ours!) and the peace of mind that if Team Istead are there, their event will be a great success.

 

We are an audio visual company providing full AV support and conference production across the UK and Europe.

www.istead.co.uk

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