What's Floating Around Cloud 9? 18 June 2018

Welcome to another week and unless you have been hiding under a rock, you may have noticed a little event taking place, The World Cup 2018, in Russia.

It's a while since we bought you a guide to some of the hotels and venues that fall under a theme, but with football fever (at least until we knocked out of the tournament - fingers crossed we go all the way) we thought it a reasonably good idea!

So the Cloud 9 guide to Football Hotels begins...

We start with Hotel Football in Manchester, which was founded by two of the major names from Manchester United. Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs first came up with the idea of starting a hospitality company,  after travelling the world during their footballing careers and as they have experienced more restaurants and hotels than most, it has given them an innate understanding of what makes an outstanding establishment.

They have a range of meeting spaces available for up to 350 delegates, including a roof top terrace called Heaven, which can cater for parties of up to 200 guests and offers spectacular views of Old Trafford.

Just over the M62 in Liverpool is The Shankly Hotel, a tribute to the life and career of one of football's finest managers. The rooms and suites are as unique as Bill Shankly himself, offering comfortable, stylish and spacious accommodation as well as a spacious conference and events centre  known as Eden, which can hold up to 350 delegates.

A little further afield and you can discover a relatively new hotel from Cristiano Ronaldo who has teamed up with Portuguese hotel group Pestana for the first of four hotel collaborations, with the  memorabilia-filled Pestana CR7 Funchal. 

It's more of a lifestyle hotel than a MICE Hotel but guests can discover a personalised training programme and yoga mats in the rooms, along with Smart TV's and all of the latest luxury amenities. 

Over in Prague however, if you want to be right on top of the action (assuming you are a fan!) then you could try the Iris Hotel Eden, which is set in an eastern part of the Eden Arena,  a football stadium of famous Prague club Slavie Prague. The hotel has 150 guest rooms, and event space for up to 400 guests. 

The trend for Football Hotels seems to have started in Argentina, with the Hotel Boca in Buenos Aires,back in 2012, when Argentina’s most revered football club, Boca Juniors, had a hotel dedicated to them. It's probably a trend that will continue and for the MICE industry, if we have sports mad clients it can only be a good thing!

Fear not if your client is not into football at all, not only are there a range of hotels attached to golf, rugby, cricket and golf and after all, the World Cup only lasts four weeks.

Here in the events industry we can create a legacy with our events that lasts a lot longer!

Have a great week.

What's Floating Around Cloud 9? 9 June 2014

Welcome to another week and we're pleased to report that last weeks Midlands Media Awards went extremely well, with 300 guests at Aston Villa, celebrating the success of journalists and broadcasters from throughout the region.

We had lots of nice comments following the event which is also a positive and judging by the photos from the night we think everyone looked pretty happy with the event (including Qasa Alom from BBC Radio in Stoke who seems pretty pleased!) so we think it was a job well done.

No time to rest on our laurels though as this week our attention is all on the CIPR Northern Conference which is taking place in Manchester this Thursday.

This year’s Northern Conference will provide insight and learning into the skills required to operate in a digital PR landscape. Industry leaders will demonstrate how PR, Content Marketing, SEO and Social Media all work together to create fully integrated and measurable earned media campaigns.

Delegates will learn from the best in our industry about optimising copy for SEO, how paid, earned, owned and shared channels work together, content strategies for social and PR, as well as digital reputation management and monitoring. 

The Northern Conference is perfect for PRs at any stage in their career and is filled with insight, learning and no doubt a good debate! So whether you are in- house or agency, in the voluntary or charity sector, or thinking about a career in PR, this is the conference for you.

Stephen Waddington

The Speaker Line Up is pretty impressive with Earned Media Specialist from the BBC, James English, CIPR President Stephen Waddington, Drew Benvie, founder of Battenhall (Drew is the UK’s #1 most respected practitioner in New Media Age’s 2011).

 Additionally we have the Global Social Media Manager for LateRooms, The Communications Director for the Met Office, Representatives from the Co-operative Group, Harkable and McCanns as well as Google and YouTube so it should be an incredibly interesting day.

You can follow some of the activity live on the day using #CIPRNC

In other news this week it would be churlish of us not to mention the World Cup as football fever will no doubt be gripping the nation in the coming weeks. However if you don't like football the next few weeks might be a bit tortuous so we thought we'd look at ways to avoid it altogether. We have blatantly pinched this article from one we found online, but it made us laugh so much, we ran out of time to think up our own ways of surviving the tournament!

 
1. Walk around blindfolded for four weeks. Not only will you not have to endure watching all those football matches, but you could say it was a social experiment.

2. Invest in cable TV. Then you can watch E4's live coverage of Big Brother all day, and ignore the football altogether. (Although if you really wanted to miss the World Cup, you should have applied to be in the Big Brother house in the first place).

3. Arrange a last-minute expedition trekking in the Himalayas. Lots of scenery but no TVs.

4. Use the four weeks to organise your wardrobe. Have a massive clearing out spree, then go on the mother of all shopping trips. Retail therapy is the only answer to football fatigue. You know it makes sense!

5. As many of the matches are shown in the mornings (because of the time difference), have a lie in and miss the whole thing.

6. Become a nun (it's only for four weeks), and spend the time in quiet contemplation at your local convent.

7. Rent out all your favourite films from your local video shop and turn your home into a cinema for the whole of June. You could even hold your own mini film festival, and invite all your friends who are also trying to avoid the World Cup.

8. Pretend you're Harry Potter, and live in a cupboard during the competition.

9. Become an eco-warrior, and go and occupy a threatened tree. Lots of fresh air, and no soccer highlights with Des Lynam.

10. Take up football and train really hard. Then you might get into the England squad and get injured, or into the Irish squad and fall out with your manager. Either way, you'll miss the World Cup altogether. It worked for Gary Neville and Roy Keane.

So that's it for this week. Don't forget the deadline for Brand You and for The Fresh Awards is fast approaching...

Enjoy! 

What's Floating Around Cloud 9? 22 July 2013

Welcome to another week and whilst we all continue to enjoy this rather spectacular summery weather (its probably the best Summer in Cloud 9’s history to date!) our thoughts are already turning ahead to rain macs, woolly jumpers, wellington boots and hopefully another great Summer next year.

Event planning requires just that, lots of planning so we are already booking venues for the Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer of 2014 and we have got a little bit of an issue.

Our schedule for next June includes around half a dozen awards ceremonies and conferences and it seems that every client wants a Thursday – which is not only impossible for us unless anyone has altered the calendar and not told us – but is also hampered by a little football competition next year – The World Cup!

Although the competition kicks off on Thursday 12^th June, and England have yet to formally qualify, assuming they do, they are not scheduled to play their first match until 17 June – however, World Cup fever will no doubt have an impact on any events next year…

The Preliminary Draw was widely adjudged to have smiled on England, with bookmakers immediately making them odds-on favourites to top Group H. Nonetheless, the Three Lions would do well to heed some historical warnings before they begin booking flights for Brazil 2014. 

Points have, after all, been dropped to both Ukraine and Montenegro in recent preliminary campaigns, while Poland were famously responsible for a rare English qualifying failure in 1974. Few will envisage a similar slip-up this time around, but while Moldova and San Marino are unlikely to threaten the top spots, none of the leading quartet can be discounted. 

We don’t confess to know much about football here at Cloud 9 Towers and even less about the host country of the 2014 tournament, Brazil, but we do predict that if England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland all make it through, we may need to think about additional screens at events to accommodate any football fans and we will have an even bigger headache on dates!

Whilst we rarely run events or escorted tours that take us out of good old blighty, we are definitely dipping our toes in more and more international events just recently so this seemed like an opportune time to find out a little more about the country hosting the World Cup in 2014, Brazil.

The largest country in South America, Brazil stretches over almost half of the continent. With the Atlantic Ocean on its eastern coastline, Brazil shares frontiers with Venezuela, Guyana, French Guyana and Surinam to the north. Its neighbours to the west are Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru, while Colombia is to the north-west and Uruguay directly south. Of all the countries in South America, only Chile and Ecuador do not border Brazil.

With a surface area of 8,547,404 km², Brazil is the fifth largest country on the planet behind Russia, China, Canada and the United States. It covers 4,345 km from north to south between its furthest points and 4,330 km from east to west. The highest population concentrations are along the Atlantic coastlines, most notably in the two largest cities, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The capital Brasilia has a population of 2,094,000, according to 2003 estimates, and it is situated over 1,000 km inland.

Nearly a quarter of the world's coffee comes from Brazil, with its plantations spread around the states of Sao Paulo, Parana, Espiríto Santo and Minas Gerais. Likewise, Brazil is one of the foremost producers of sugar cane, used not only to make sugar but also the alcohol that fuels 2.5 million specially-designed vehicles. Production levels of ricin, cocoa, corn and oranges are among the highest in the world as well, while soy, tobacco, potato, cotton, rice, wheat, manioc and bananas are also produced in large quantities. In addition, sheep and cattle are reared in almost every state.

The Brazilian rainforest is another source of natural riches, including tung oil, rubber, carnauba oil, caroa fibre, medicinal plants, vegetable oils, resins, timber for construction and various woods used in furniture-making. Brazil has also begun mining fairly recently, again taking advantage of its abundant natural resources.

Brazil has roughly 190 million inhabitants, making it the fifth most populated country on Earth. Almost 75 per cent of them are Catholics, whilst another 26 million are Protestants. Brazil's Jewish community is very small by comparison.

The country is divided into five regions (Centre-West, North, Northeast, South and Southeast), which are themselves divided into 26 states plus the Federal District that houses Brazilian capital Brasília.

Known for its enormous hydroelectric potential, the Southeast region is the most heavily-populated in Brazil with almost 80 million inhabitants, roughly 40 per cent of the total. It is also the most densely-populated (84.21 inhabitants per km²) and has the highest urbanisation rate at 90 per cent.

The official language is Portuguese, however many Brazilians speak other languages according to their origins. German and Italian, for example, are fairly prevalent in the cities of the South.

Better start brushing up on our Portuguese then just in case!

In other news this week, Brand You for Bristol Media is well underway with entries just about to be sent off for judging to their respective juries and the Cloud 9 team will be at The Fresh Awards judging - no easy task!

And our planning for 2014 continues, anyone got a spare Thursday?!

That’s its for this week, enjoy the sunshine!

See you soon