Global conference event planners need eight things before they can quote: firm dates, a delegate count split by origin city, the venue status, the format and daily hours, language and travel needs, a budget band in one currency, the approval chain, and whatever has already been decided.
Ask three international teams to price the same conference on a twenty-minute call and you will get three totals that cannot be laid beside each other. That is rarely competition. It is three groups of people filling the same blanks with their own guesses. Global conference event planners work from a brief, and the half page you write before anyone opens a spreadsheet is the cheapest work in the whole project. Here is what belongs on it.
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A call tells them the mood, not the maths
Everything an international bid contains is derived from a handful of facts, and a conversation loses most of them within a week.
Crew size comes from your hours. Freight comes from your venue. Translation comes from who is in the room. Visa letters come from where people start their journey. Miss one fact and a planner has two choices: price the generous version and look expensive, or price the lean version and look careless. Neither helps you decide.
Write it down instead. Half a page, sent to every bidder on the same morning, with the same deadline. It costs you an hour and it buys you comparability.
The eight lines they read first
These are the fields that move the number, and what each one decides once the conference leaves home ground.
| Line in the brief | What to write | What it settles once you travel |
|---|---|---|
| Dates | The window, the preferred days, and honestly whether they can shift | Whether a venue can be negotiated at all, and whether shipping goes by sea or air |
| Delegates | A range, split by the cities and countries people travel from | Visa letters, hotel blocks, arrival waves, and how early registration must open |
| Venue | Signed, shortlisted or wide open, with the contract if you have it | Ceiling height, power, loading access and rigging rules, none of which can be assumed |
| Format and hours | Plenary, breakouts, exhibition, dinner, and the first and last hour of each day | Shift lengths, overtime, how many rooms need technical cover at once |
| Language | The languages in the room and the ones your material exists in | Interpretation booths, receivers, reprinting, and subtitling for recordings |
| Budget band | A range with a currency, and whether tax sits inside or outside it | Whether you are shown one event or three, and which level of finish is even proposed |
| Sign-off | The person who approves, their deputy, and the days they are unreachable | How fast a decision moves when a venue holds a date for forty-eight hours |
| Already fixed | Anything decided: an agency, a theme, a speaker, a hotel, a supplier you must use | Stops effort being spent designing around a decision you had already taken |
Dates: say how firm they are
State the dates and then state their honesty, because a movable date is worth real money and a fixed one changes the whole plan.
If the dates are locked by a board meeting or a product cycle, say so, and every bidder will price around scarcity. If there is a fortnight of flexibility, say that too, and a good team will come back with two options and a reason. What nobody can work with is a date presented as firm and then moved in week six, after deposits have gone out.
Delegates: the number and the map
Give a range rather than a single figure, and break it down by where people begin the journey.
An audience of four hundred all based in one city is a different job from four hundred arriving from eleven countries across three days. The second needs invitation letters, a longer registration window, airport coordination, staggered welcome desks and food that respects far more diets. Include how many are speakers, how many are sponsors and how many come from your own payroll, because each group is handled differently.
Venue: whichever answer is true
Say plainly whether the venue is signed, shortlisted or undecided, and hand over the contract if one exists.
A signed venue turns the brief into a technical question: what will that room take, and when does it open for build. An open venue turns it into a design question, and the planner can save you money by matching the format to the right kind of space. The costly middle is a venue everyone assumes is nearly booked. If a hold expires in three weeks, put that line in the brief.
Money: a band, a currency, one owner
Name a range in a single currency and say who carries the exchange risk.
Giving a band is not weakening your hand. Leave it out and each bidder designs a different event, so you end up comparing things that were never alike, and you read proposals you could never have funded. Say whether the figure includes taxes and local duties, whether delegate travel sits inside your number or in another department’s, and whether any part is funded by sponsors or delegate fees, since that changes how invoices are raised. If you genuinely do not know what is realistic, say so and ask for the drivers first; our page on what shapes a corporate event budget sets out what moves the figure before any number is quoted.
Sign-off: one name, one deputy
Write down who approves, who deputises and when both are unavailable, because international planning dies in waiting rooms.
Venues abroad hold dates for days, not weeks. Airlines and hotels release blocks on their own calendar. A brief that names a decision-maker, a backup and a maximum turnaround for approvals is worth more to a planner than an extra page about your brand values. Add the finance contact too, along with how purchase orders are raised at your end, since a team that cannot invoice cannot book.
What is already decided
List every decision you have already taken, including the awkward ones.
- Suppliers you are contractually required to use, or ones you will not work with again.
- A theme, a campaign line or a key visual that is already signed off internally.
- Speakers confirmed, and whose travel your company is paying for.
- A hotel, a caterer or a technical partner the venue imposes on you.
- Anything from a previous edition that must be repeated, and anything that must not.
This is the most commonly skipped part of a brief and the most expensive. Teams spend days proposing around constraints nobody told them about.
Send it, then listen to the questions
The questions you get back are the first real test of the shortlist.
Expect to be asked things you had not considered: load-in hours, the ratio of speakers to sessions, whether recordings are public, who owns the delegate data. Answer everyone in one message so nobody is bidding on better information than the others. Then give a common deadline and a common format, and ask that exclusions be written down rather than discussed.
Be careful of the bidder who asks nothing at all. Either they have run this exact shape of conference before and will happily say where, or they have skimmed your document. A quick tell: does their first reply mention your constraints, or their own credentials?
Where to send it
If your conference is being run out of India, or moves between Indian cities before it goes further, we can answer that brief in detail. Our conference organisers page covers the planning, production and delegate side of business conferences, and our events across India page explains how we work in cities beyond our own. The company sits in Pune and the work goes wherever the conference does, which is how 500+ events in 30+ cities have happened since 2013, for 100+ brands and companies. There is one more reason to write the brief down: it becomes the thing you measure the finished event against, long after the quotes are forgotten. Send your half page through our contact form and we will reply to it line by line instead of posting back a rate card.
Frequently asked questions
What should a conference brief contain?
Eight lines: the dates and how movable they are, a delegate range split by where people travel from, the venue status, the format with daily start and finish times, the languages in the room, a budget band with a currency, the person who signs off, and everything already decided. Half a page is enough.
Should I tell planners my budget?
Yes, as a range. Without one you receive proposals built for three different events and none of them can be compared. A band also stops teams spending days on a version you were never going to fund. Name the currency, say whether tax sits inside the figure, and say which costs live in another department.
What if we have not chosen a venue yet?
Say so clearly, because an open venue is an advantage rather than a gap. A planner who joins before the space is signed can match the format to the room, negotiate the build window, and avoid a hall that looks impressive but cannot take rigging or power. Just be honest about which holds are expiring.
How much detail do international planners need about delegates?
More than most companies expect. Numbers alone are not enough; origin matters. Invitation letters, arrival waves, hotel blocks, transfers, dietary range and registration timing all follow from where people start their journey. Include how many are speakers, sponsors and staff, and flag anyone travelling with accessibility needs or family.
How long before the event should the brief go out?
Send it as soon as the objective and the rough size are known, even if the dates are still soft. For an event in another country, long lead items such as venue contracts, invitation letters, shipping and speaker diaries drive the timeline, so an early brief with honest gaps beats a complete one sent late.
Vicky founded Plan With YOLO in Pune in 2013 and leads the planning on corporate events, weddings and stage production across Maharashtra.
