Asylum 3 Official Post Event Analysis
First off a HUGE thank you to everyone who attended, the crew/staff, our guests and anyone we have forgot.
When we launched Asylum back in 2007 we wanted to make it the biggest and best Supernatural Event for fans all over the world, since then there have been numerous conventions in US with one recently in Australia and one upcoming in Canada. While we have continued to do them in Europe they have grown each year. Asylum is very important to us and we don't want to let people down, Asylum 1 was mainly due to a lack of organization and bad hotel layout, Asylum 2 had very minor issues just as all events do, mostly these were behind the scenes between us and another company. For Asylum 3 we believed we were on track to run a very successful event.
On Friday both Paul and I were there from the very early hours of the morning and while we could see people arriving we didn't think much of it to begin with. At around 12pm crowds of attendees starting queuing up at the wrong tables, this was due to notes being placed on these tables not by any Rogue staff but by the hotel something we later found out, once this happened it was very difficult to do anything about it. From there depending on who you were or what you bought things got better or worse, we had an issue with the photo studio and autograph tickets, we thought the new database system we had would work like a dream and the staff spent the majority of Friday morning putting these into the little brown envelopes however as we all now know it didn't work, there are only two people to blame for this me and Paul, the staff worked as hard as they could to get you guys through registration and all the issues that arose with that. Over the weekend itself due to various issues we lost over 4 hours this really ate into the autograph time that was allotted throughout the weekend.
However when it comes down to it 1400 people was too many to have attend our style of convention where every ticket is the same and all attendees have the same opportunity to buy what they want unless everything runs like clockwork too many people didn't enjoy it enough for us which in turn meant we didn't enjoy it either. The idea was good but in practice it didn't work out the way we wanted it to, while we could see issues it was very hard for us to do much about it, we worked as hard as we could and the staff in place were fantastic. What we can do is look towards Asylum 4 and where we go from there.
For future events we have already had plenty of ideas of what to do including using a function suite to hold registration in rather then the lobby area. We will also be capping our events: Hell Hounds (400 -500 attendees), Asylum 4 (800 - 1000 attendees) and Asylum Germany (600 - 800 depending on the venue we use).
For Photo Studio issues please click here to email the photographer direct as we are unable to answer any questions on delivery times etc as this is all being done by the photographer.
We thank you for your continued support and we hope you will attend again next year.
Best Wishes
Wayne and Paul