We are looking at the possibility of some sort of event for this year, but nothing has been arranged at the moment.
I can however confirm that we will sadly
not be returning to Blyton Park as a club. It's been kept quiet up to now but there will be questions as to why so I'm going to just vent a little bit to explain. 😂
As you know we have been going to Blyton for a number years and had a great relationship with the old site managers who left just before the pandemic.
Unfortunately this years show was somewhat overshadowed by how our event team, and some of you guys as customers were treated by several members of the Blyton staff. We spent the weekend trying to be polite and respectful to an unwelcoming, prejudicial and downright rude site manager, who had clearly decided before we arrived that we were going to be trouble makers, to quote "because we are a Clio club". This is partially the fault of the poor behaviour of another Clio group several years ago who will remain nameless but it doesn't take a genius. We have been running the same professional event year after year, with consistently well behaved members so this should not have been applied to us before we even arrived this year. The site manager was seen shouting rudely at some of you for apparently not understanding their misleading signage and we had numerous complaints.
We also had (not for the first time) many reports of rude treatment by the staff in the onsite cafe. We then experienced this first hand ourselves when the event team dared to ask to purchase some food to be ready whenever it was available. We ended up sending someone to Tesco for our lunch.... Sadly years of management understaffing the cafe for our event has lead to the overworked staff being rude too many times. They are always aware of the numbers and demand they can expect, so there is no excuse.
To top it all off, we returned exhausted from the weekend to an email from the new site management (who couldn't be bothered to attend to introduce themselves, and only have the word of their staff to go by) telling us that we disrespected their staff, were rude to the cafe staff, and left the site looking like a huge rubbish bin. We always clear up and generally leave the site cleaner than it was when we arrived. Fortunately we took photos and here is how we left the site:
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We responded with our side of the story and these photos and while they agreed to put this to their staff members there was never an apology or retraction.
Sadly this means we aren't prepared to return, so will be looking for an alternative venue for future club events. Suggestions are more than welcome!