Nobody wants to cancel their Event. They want to know if there's Air-Con.

Europe's had three heatwaves this year already. Records broken in a bunch of places, and the third one isn't even over yet.

We had a bunch of conversation data sitting on our platform from venues across the UK and Belgium, so I got curious. What actually happens to a venue's inbox when it's 35 degrees outside?

Pulled the numbers. Compared quiet weeks to heatwave weeks, for all three waves.

A few things jumped out.

Entertainment venues feel it fast. Corporate venues barely notice.

First: air-con and cooling questions went up every time, obviously. But how much depended entirely on the type of venue.

Entertainment venues, the walk-in-tonight kind, saw almost a 10x jump in "is there air-con" type questions during the big June wave. Makes sense, you're deciding today, it's roasting outside, that's the first thing on your mind.

Corporate event venues, the book-three-months-out kind, only saw about a 2x bump in June. The account manager already covered climate control back when the deal was signed, so there's less left to ask.

June was the outlier, not just "the first wave"

Second: June was a real outlier, not just "the first wave." May's heatwave was milder and more regional, and heat-related questions rose about 2.7x from a pretty low base. June's spike was roughly 7x higher than May's in absolute terms. The current wave, still going as I write this, is running lower than June too, though that comparison is incomplete since the heatwave hasn't finished.

I don't have a clean explanation for why June specifically was so much bigger than the other two. Could be the records being broken made it more top of mind. Could be something about timing or duration. I genuinely don't know, just noting it's not a simple downwards trend across three waves.

Nobody cancelled. They rearranged.

Third, and this is the one I didn't expect: cancellations barely moved, in any of the three waves. If anything they dipped slightly each time.

Nobody bailed because of the heat. They adapted instead. Best message I saw in the data: "Can I rearrange due to the hot weather." Not cancel. Rearrange.

Worth being precise here: this isn't the whole industry. Some events with no indoor option or no way to cool the room did cancel outright this year, a climate conference in London among them, which is its own kind of irony. The difference seems to come down to whether there's a real alternative to offer. Got an indoor space and a spare time slot? People take it. Don't have one? The decision gets made for you.

What to actually do about it

So for venues that do have a room and a schedule to play with, heat mostly just costs you a few extra questions your team needs to answer fast. A few things worth having ready before the next one (there will be a next one):

• Put your cooling situation front and center on the booking page, don't make people ask

• Give your team or your digital colleagues a one-line answer to "is there air-con" so nobody's digging for it mid-conversation

• For outdoor or exposed spaces, offer the reschedule before the customer has to.

• Decide your heat threshold before the heatwave, not during it. A number, a warning level, whatever works, just have "if this happens, we do X" ready instead of making the call in a panic.

• If you're a walk-in entertainment venue, expect this to hit faster and harder than it does for the corporate-events crowd next door.

Get ahead of it

This isn't going away. Three heatwaves in one year isn't a fluke anymore, it's the new normal we're planning around. Venues that build a real heat plan now, cooling info up front, a threshold decided in advance, a reschedule ready before it's asked for, are the ones that'll handle wave four without breaking a sweat. 

The ones that wait to figure it out mid-heatwave are the ones that may lose the booking.

Get ahead of it.