My experience of the Convention began bright and early yesterday morning, when I had to manipulate the London Underground on my own for the first time ever! Being a country girl at heart, I was initially worried about finding my way around, but I actually quite enjoyed the journey - though this may have has something to do with the fact I'd just missed Rush Hour...
I got to the ExCel Centre ridiculously early. We had planned to meet at 11am and I had about 45 minutes to kill. That time elapsed fairly quickly though, as there was a bit of confusion about where I was supposed to be putting my luggage (entirely my fault and I almost sent my bags off on a shuttle destined for France, oops!)
I soon found the rest of my team and was assigned the role of 'Meeter and Greeter' at the entrance - a slightly daunting task, as I had to welcome all of our journalists and most of them, I'd never met before! In truth, I did expect to feel a bit more overwhelmed, but it was just really fun (and so bizarre to finally be able to put names to faces - no one ever quite looks like you imagine them!)
It was lunchtime when most of our motley journalist crew had arrived, so I re-joined my team in the lunch hall to chow down on some very tasty pasta at the buffet! There wasn't much time to eat though, as the grand tours were about to start...
We got into groups for the tour (you can imagine how long this took, so many people were there to organise!) and were taken around the exhibition by a lovely (if ever so slightly too chipper) guide called Lucy. We started off in a mini cinema and sat down to see a welcome video from Panasonic... in 3D! The exhibition was absolutely HUGE and we saw so many great products! What was really nice was that many of them had been put into familiar settings (like the Viera Plasma TV models in a living room setting), so that people looking around the exhibition would be able to relate to the products. My favourite part was the Lumix arena - a miniature basketball court set up with stands so that the journalists could look on as the 'players' shot hoops and use the new cameras and camcorders to film and capture the action as it was happening. We got lots of positive feedback about this, which was great!
The tour took most of the afternoon, but as soon as things started to flag, we took a boat ride to the other side of London to get ready for dinner (my knowledge of London isn't that great, so when I say 'the other side', it's perhaps just better to call it 'wherever it was we needed to be'!)
The weather was drizzly and miserable, but as soon as the boat ride was over, we were whisked away to our hotel... the Park Plaza. I had no idea what it was going to be like, so imagine my complete delight when I saw...
Well, this was the lobby... it was so spectacular!! The hotel is right in the middle of Westminster and is the swankiest place I've ever visited. Before we went to the restaurant for dinner (more on that in a moment), we all met in the bar for cocktails - mine cost a tenner! Frivolous, much?
The restaurant - wow. Aptly named 'Altitude', we were dining on the 27th floor, looking out over London's greatest sites at nighttime and it was absolutely stunning. After stuffing ourselves silly, we headed back to the hotel for more drinks and stayed there til the early hours - which meant rounding up the journalists the next morning to meet in the hotel lobby for 8.45am was a little tricky... ;)
Better 9am than never, though - our original plan was to head back to the ExCel Centre for day 2 of the Convention by boat, the same one as last night. I should have mentioned earlier that the boat ride was an hour long, so choppy winds and churning post-party stomachs would not have been a pleasant mix, so we took the tube! A very good plan.
The second day of the Convention was much the same as the first and our group saw the bits we didn't get time for the day before. As the day went on, the journalists slowly started to leave until, come afternoon, all we had left to do was look after our bloggers and lifestyle press for the open press event. Pana PR Team were situated in the Home Appliances section of the exhibition (which was tucked around perhaps too many corners, which meant that not many were able to find us!) We were expecting 40 - 50 journalists for the afternoon, but only around 12 showed up! Oh well - the ones who did make it had a blast and were given an awesome goody bag, which I helped to prepare before the Convention with Sara, my manager.
The goody bags were brilliant and contained a box of these beeeautiful chocolates!
http://www.hotelchocolat.co.uk/finest-chocolates-P260151/
Yes, that is £20 a pop you can see. Delish.
So everyone's hard work paid off (and trust me, a lot of hard work goes into a pan-European event like this) and we all had a great time! One of the biggest events of the year on Panasonic UK's calendar? Tick. Now breeeathe and get back to the office...
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