Newcastle is renowned for its passionate football supporters, filling the ground at St James’ Park to capacity, week after week. The venue has also become a hugely successful and popular location for rugby, playing host to both World Cup matches in 2015 and the European Rugby Champions Cup Final (Heineken Cup) in May 2019.
Parkers were fortunate enough to be involved in VIP travel for both events, first in 2015 looking after a number of VIP visitors from around the globe, as well as some of the World Cup TV presenters such as Francois Pienaar and Craig Doyle. As with most large events, we were kept extremely busy throughout, but managed to cope with the considerable extra demand over the couple of weeks they were here.
Our involvement for the European Rugby Champions Cup Final was somewhat more intense as this entailed looking after Mrs Charlene de Carvalho, who was flying in to present the Heineken Cup to the new Champions. This involved a significant amount of pre-arrival planning the day before, with her personal security staff, looking at primary and secondary routes, timings, safehouses and venue access to ensure faultless execution with the reassurance of appropriate contingency plans in place, if required. In the event everything went like clockwork, but it was reassuring to know that all eventualities had been considered. In the meantime, we also had the pleasure of looking after many of the EPCR officials, but fortunately without the need for the same level of security as the principal!
We were really delighted and honoured to be asked to provide services for these two major events. It certainly beats sitting behind a desk all day, as I’m doing currently because of the coronavirus lockdown! Hopefully it won’t be too long before we can all get back to our usual lives with a bit more challenge and excitement!! In the meantime, take care and stay safe.
If you need to book a VIP chauffeur or any executive travel you can do so easily via our online booking system.
If you would like to discuss any VIP or executive travel plans then we’d love to hear from so contact us here.
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