News

Durham University conference business is top of the charts

(31 July 2006)

Durham University’s team who market the residential colleges and other facilities for conference and tourist business when the students are away, have been voted the top sales office in the English university sector.

Commercial Director Helen Strangward and her colleagues are celebrating a leap up to 1st place in the England, after a ‘mystery buyer’ survey by an independent company. The firm, Venuemasters, began surveying last year, and placed Durham 7th out of 88. This year it called 90 university conference sales offices and placed Durham’s CATO (Conference & Tourism Office) team first in England and 2nd overall in the UK after Edinburgh. Helen Strangward said: “It was a huge achievement last year as the team members were relatively new and had only been employed and taking sales calls for a few weeks. I am even more delighted that we have improved on this result and are going from strength to strength.” The nine-strong team are based at the Mountjoy Centre at the heart of the University off Stockton Road, Durham. They are the main inquiry point for people looking for venues for conferences, meetings and other events such as weddings, or even a few nights’ bed-&-breakfast. They serve as a link with all the University’s colleges in Durham and Queen’s Campus, Stockton, who provide the accommodation and catering, and many of the meeting rooms and other facilities. There are choices of modern or historic settings and the colleges have more than 1500 en-suite rooms to let plus over 3000 standard rooms. The University caters for 150,000 bed-nights a year on conferences and other events. They host about 65 wedding celebrations and over 50 major international conferences. This year’s schedule includes the UK Scrabble Championships, the annual meeting of the Society of Indexers, a world forum on superconductivity hosted by Durham physicists, and conferences about UK-North American university links (the British University Transatlantic Exchange Association), about meteorites, rock and the Earth’s magma (the 3rd International Workshop for Highly Siderophile Element Geochemistry) and the protection of the land and water environment (the annual symposium of the British Hydrological Society coming up in September) - to name but a few.

• CATO