Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-01-07 08:55:28 - Graham Ellis
By upbringinging, I'm a Londoner - but we don't offer public courses in London. Why not?
London is an expensive location in which to have an office; were we to offer public courses there, the prices would have to be higher that we charge at Melksham in Wiltshire, and the facilities would have to be much more restricted. Unless we were very lucky indeed, I'm sure a London location would be much noisier, and I know that trainee's overnight costs to stay in the area would double or treble.
For the majority of our customers, our current location works very well indeed. For people who don't live in London, we're easy to get to with good public transport and road links, and there are plenty of places to stay at a reasonable price within a mile or two. For Londoners, it's a chance to get away to study, and to NOT have an hour's commute on each end of the day to dull their ability to concentrate on what is probably going to be quite an intensive course.
There are two situations where we're told that we don't get people's business because we don't have a London centre. The first of these is for London based trainees who need to get home by a specific time due to family responsibilities; I really feel for such people, but even if we had a London course on offer, chances are that they would be arriving late and/or leaving early anyway unless our venue happened to be exactly right. The second situation is for overseas visitors who want to combine a course with sightseeing and / or visiting friends and family who live in London. Our strong advise to such people is to separate the business and pleasure parts of their visit - to put aside the days of their course just for learning, and to spend a few other days just visiting.
I'm not saying "never", but I would need a lot of convincing to run public London courses. It seems to me that the main reasons that people ask for such courses are nothing to do with the course itself, and that in effect they're looking for a less good product at a higher price, primarily to provide them with something that suits them personally at the expense of a less good learning experience.
[As an aside - private courses at customer's offices in London are a different matter. We can and do provide such courses, and if you have 4 or more trainees needing the same course at the same time, it will work out lower cost over all. There are sample quotations for such courses on this site.]