Congress Rental gains new ground in virtual events arena

From left: Congress Rental’s Oliver Langbein, Lucas Flood, Luke Hamilton, and Michael Cousins unloading equipment for an event at Macquarie University

Rather than shutting their doors during the pandemic, Congress Rental – a specialist provider of simultaneous interpretation equipment – invested the time to expand their repertoire by thoroughly developing skills required for virtual and hybrid integration, and is well poised to capture the virtual and hybrid events market as events around the world restart.

“When everything changed in March 2020, our core on-site interpretation equipment rental business wasn’t viable anymore. We had to pivot our business and become totally virtual, so that we could integrate interpretation into them and offer these solutions to our clients,” managing director Jeremy Ducklin told TTGmice.

From left: Congress Rental’s Oliver Langbein, Lucas Flood, Luke Hamilton, and Michael Cousins unloading equipment for an event at Macquarie University

Pre-pandemic, he indicated, convincing organisations that virtual events could be just as impactful as in-person ones was a huge challenge. Fast forward to today, Congress Rental managed to build an entirely new client base and grown its remote interpretation business “massively”, where more than 90 per cent of their customers are new compared to pre-2020, shared Ducklin.

But even as the world gingerly emerges post-lockdown, challenges for the events industry still abound.

Aside from obvious challenges such as border restrictions and a never-ending list of health protocols to be followed, Ducklin pointed to several other issues – labour and the rising costs of equipment and freight – the company is currently facing.

“Many have exited the events industry, and freelance labour is more difficult and expensive to procure. We need to have more staff to manage our online events, and returning in-person events. While we are willing to hire and train individuals, finding the right people is a challenge,” he lamented.

Covid-19 has also resulted in chip shortages, which is disrupting the availability of equipment, while sea freight now costs four times more than pre-Covid, which Ducklin said had a “big impact on budgets set many years ago”.

Despite the challenges, Congress Rental is pushing forward with its expansion projects outside of headquarters Australia. In 2017 and 2019, Congress Rental started up in Indonesia and New Zealand respectively.

“Congress Rental Indonesia is still our investment baby. We will continue to establish ourselves there and are quietly confident about how the business will develop in 2022. (As for Congress Rental New Zealand), although we have had some good wins, the tight lockdown and exclusion of international visitors has had a negative impact on the business. But now that visitors are allowed back in again, we are confident of strong growth through the relationships we have developed.”

Ducklin revealed plans to head to the Philippines. The company already has “a website and partners in place”, but the project was put on the backburner when the pandemic hit.

Ducklin: virtual and hybrid events will have so many options that each client needs a curated solution to fit their needs

Besides expansion, the company has also been implementing a raft of new event technology, such as cloud-based solutions. Calling this a “powerful” tool in the company’s arsenal, Ducklin explained that this cloud-based solution would help to save on “capital expenses, cross hire charges and add contingency, scalability, backup, cloud recording and security”.

Yet another product Congress Rental is working on is Hub Connect, where multiple meeting rooms around the globe can be joined together. This means that all delegates are co-located with their interpreters, and “everyone’s audio, video and languages are connected, where everyone can see and hear what is going on irrespective of their location”, he explained.

When asked for his thoughts on the viability of hybrid and virtual events as in-person events return, Ducklin believes the former will continue to play a key role in the events business.

He elaborated: “I think event planners will now have to include a virtual component in most of the meetings that they undertake. While this change happened partly because of Covid-19, in the future it may be due to delegates being concerned about their carbon footprint and climate change. People now have an expectation that they can still obtain key learning points from a meeting without having to travel to a distant location.”

He expects demand for remote interpretation to grow as multilingual virtual and hybrid events carry on.

“Historically, organisers dismissed remote interpretation as an unreliable alternative to on-site interpretation. Now that they’ve seen it in action, it’s likely that doubts about the reliability of remote interpretation have lessened.

“With the cost savings on interpreter travel and accommodation, it’s clear that most organisations will seriously consider remote interpretation for future events virtual and hybrid events moving forward,” he added.

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