Where to have your company Christmas dinner in Italy

Where to have your company Christmas dinner in Italy

1. Know your budget

There are so many choices to make, when planning your company Christmas dinner. Will you go for a traditional meal or will you have it grow into a proper party night? Will entertainment be no more than discreet background music or will it be the centrepiece, with a proper show and engaging live music? Would you like the overall atmosphere to be elegant and formal or laid-back and friendly? Black-tie or “let-your-hair-down”? All these questions can be answered once you’ve pinned down your budget, which will set clear limits to what you can do with your event. Start planning before knowing your exact budget and you’ll run the risk of building extremely unrealistic expectations. Once you know what your budget is, you should divide it and allocate different shares to different aspects of your event. The largest share (ideally 50% or higher) should go towards renting the venue and feeding your guests, thus shaping the core of the whole experience. The rest will cover entertainment, decorations and any other need that might arise. Make sure you always set aside a small portion of your budget for emergency or unforeseen expenses.

2. Find the right venue

Finding the right venue for a Company Christmas Dinner is essential. Not only will it eat up most of your budget, but it will also set the pace and tone of the whole event. Making the right choice at this stage will make everything else run smoother and easier. For SM Italia Spa’s Company Christmas Dinner, for instance, we at Smart Eventi picked an unusual venue: the stunning Bagatti Valsecchi Museum in Milan. This choice of venue implied an obvious choice of entertainment too: we offered our guests a guided tour of the museum’s collection. And after all there’s no real reason for a company Christmas dinner to take place in a restaurant. For Recordati Spa, for instance, we planned a grand gala dinner in the unique setting of the Vetra Theatre, in Milan.

3. Find your voice

Black-tie event, seated dinner and a sophisticated yet unobtrusive soundtrack, or a rowdy party with finger food and a dj? This is up to you of course, and to the kind of atmosphere you think will play well with your colleagues and employees. There’s no absolute rule when it comes to having fun and bonding with your team. There are young startups that have been known to organise exclusive and strictly formal events and multinational companies that treat their employees to wild parties with loud music and generous quantities of alcohol. Finding your “voice” is about knowing your guests. How about an elegant dinner at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, with a guided tour of the original Atlantic Code by Leonardo Da Vinci? This is what we organised for DsSmith. Or you could go for a disco night with finger food and an open bar, like the one we planned for Dalani. Whatever style you choose, we recommend you leave the actual planning to a team of trained professionals.