Meeting facilities areon par with the best

All change: the hotel is spending £10 million on refurbishing its bedrooms to include business facilities

Meeting facilities areon par with the best

Gleneagles hotel by Caroline Horn

Golf venue aims to boost corporate trade

Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire hopes to increase its conference trade after spending £500,000 refurbishing its facilities.

The extensive programme, which includes upgrading the main meeting and function rooms, will be completed by the middle of next year.

Opening in the spring is a separate corporate facility comprising 58 bedrooms and four purpose-built meeting rooms with dining facilities.

Conference sales manager Fiona Hay said: “For the first time, clients will have an exclusive area for their conferences without having to take full house at Gleneagles.”

To date, the renovation of seven of the hotel’s 13 function rooms has been completed, including the Gleneagles suite, one of the largest at the hotel. It can take 360 people theatre-style and has a sophisticated audio-visual system.

As part of the investment programme, an AMX touch-screen system is being installed in all the meeting rooms. This allows all electronic functions – including lighting, air-conditioning and displays – to be controlled from a single point in the room. Digital projectors and video-conferencing technology are also being installed.

In a separate £10 million programme, all the hotel’s bedrooms are being refurbished to include new desks and separate modem and telephone points. About 145 out of the hotel’s 216 rooms have had the work completed, and 50 more of the traditional-style bedrooms will be refurbished by February.

About 50% of the hotel’s business is made up of group bookings, with the remainder classed as ‘social business’. Another 25% of group bookings comprise corporate meetings.

Hay said: “We aim to increase our corporate conference market by 2% in the next year, which will represent an overall growth in business.”

Gleneagles’ regional sales team will be promoting the new product and direction to clients through face-to-face meetings as well as via a direct-mail marketing campaign. The hotel has spent £46 million in the past few years refurbishing its rooms and developing facilities both inside the hotel and within its 850-acre grounds. These include a new falconry centre and a £2.7 million facelift for the Gleneagles Spa and Club.

The hotel, opened in 1924, is a one of the UK’s finest golfing locations, and features three world-class courses.