Simon Plumbe has provided us with some updated news on Auto Assembly 2005, the UKs only Transformers Convention this year. First up is a bookings update and for all of you like me who have not booked yet, I would recommended making your mind up quickly. Here’s what Simon said

Hi,

We thought I’d post and give you all and update on the pre-booking situation regarding Auto Assembly 2005 along with a bit of a warning about the state of play we;re in. Bookings are coming in a lot faster than ever before so we’re strongly recommending that you all book sooner rather than later if you’re planning on coming along if you want to get in this year. I’ll come onto why in a minute…

Sorry about this being a long post, but we wanted to make sure we brought you all up to speed on where we are with AA2005 and our bookings.

Pre-Bookings

As we’ve said, bookings are coming in at an astonishing rate but even we’re surprised at how quickly. With four months to go we’ve got almost 100 pre-registrations – about a third of the total from AA2004’s 320 attendees. While this might not seem like a lot, let me try to put this into perspective.

For Auto Assembly usually, bookings are slow and steady with a massive surge in the last 6-8 weeks before, and then we tend to get about 50% more people on the door. AA2000 had 30 people (with 15 pre-registering), AA2001 had 61 (30 pre-reg), AA2003 had 233 (155 pre-reg) and AA2004 had 320 (222 pre-reg). At the moment we have just under 100 booked but the astonishing figure at the moment is where we stand….

With just under 120 days to go, I compared the figures to last year. When we reached this number of pre-registrations last time, we were only 56 days away so as you can see and that was outside of the last-minute rush! If bookings continue at the pace they are coming in, WITHOUT the late rush we can expect about 300+ pre-bookings and about 450 in total. However, if we get the expected last minute rush and the steady increase in rate of bookings as always happens, then it is almost certain that AA will be a sell-out in advance so we will NOT have any on-the-door places available.

Another thing to bear in mind is that we are still talking to sponsors in order to try to bring a voice actor over to the UK again. If this happens again we can expect ticket sales to increase if we make an announcement there.

Finally about a third of those booked so far are new to Auto Assembly and we are reaching a new audience from outside the UK (including Norway and Australia) so more people are making their first venture to AA!!

As you can see, this makes it all the more clear why pre-booking is going to be essential this year and why early registration is going to be a must!

Goodie Bag

We’re still doing our usual Goodie Bag for AA2005 and at the moment there are four items confirmed currently worth about £3.40 including a copy of the latest issue of Model & Collector’s Mart magazine (courtesy of Trinity Publications), a bag of Transform-A-Snacks (thanks to Red Mill Snack Foods), a pack of G1 stickers and a poster.

However, the latter two items are limited to the first 150 pre-registrants and as we are rapidly approaching that figure, we’d strongly recommend you book fast.

We are negotiating for more freebies and hope to announce more soon, but we can’t guarantee that EVERY attendee will get every item and we do expect that more of the goodies will be limited to early registrants so if you want more freebies, the earlier you book the better!

Already Registered?

For those of you who have already registered, I’d like to clarify what we are doing this year regarding tickets. If you don’t know, we lost about about £1,000 last year on Auto Assembly, part of this was because of some people getting in without paying which wasn’t helped with the split-floor set up of the venue. Because pre-registrants had their tickets sent out, and we were short-staffed many went straight to the dealers room and straight in and some who hadn’t paid followed them in. As a result of this happening, we are not sending tickets out in advance this time (although we do have better on-the-door security this time anyway!)…

Anyway, what we are doing is to send out a confirmation slip to everyone along with an information pack which I’m putting the finishing touches to at the moment (easier said than done when we do this in our spare time!). The slips have security measures on them that make them difficult to copy if people try to pass them on to friends or copies to their friends to sneak in twice (believe us, we’ve seen it happen before!).

This slip will have the names and ticket numbers of everyone you have booked for and you’ll need to keep this confirmation slip safe. You need to present this slip on arrival at AA to one of our team where you will then be handed your packs. In there will be your personalised name badges (which you’ll need to wear at all times to gain access to Auto Assembly), your copies of The Cybertronian Times if you pre-ordered it, a copy of the programme for the day, a complete list of all the items in the aution, any other information about AA2005, possible a registration form for AA2006 plus your goodie bag.

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Sorry for the long rant, but we thought you’d want to know where we are with bookings right now! If you’ve got any questions about pre-registration or anything I’ve mentioned here, feel free to ask!

Simon

Auto Assembly 2005