Cheap Table Hire Isn't Cheerful

When it comes to furniture hire, we believe at Expo Hire UK that quality should take precedence over everything. It’s really important to us that we offer the best tables and chairs we can – which is why this blog is the only place you will find the words cheap table hire on this website.

We understand that for many people, budgets for events and occasions are getting crunched thanks to the ongoing cost of living crisis. With energy prices as high as they are, combined with inflation hitting cost of food and drinks budget constraints are going to be a factor for everyone.

However, our experience in furniture hire tells us that offering cheap tables and chairs for hire is a false economy. We’ve put this article together to showcase why spending a little bit extra money on the right equipment will save you costs in the long run.

Quality of construction

The word cheap carries with the connotation of a low quality of product. Cheap products tend to be made from cheap raw materials, using cheaper labour where corners may have been cut to churn out larger quantities in shorter amounts of time.

This is particularly true with furniture.

As you can imagine, we hire out literally thousands of tables and chairs a year, with the most popular of products going out several times to various customers. This means it’s important for us that our furniture not only looks good but is made of strong and durable materials so that it can be used repeatedly – something one cannot expect from cheap chair and table hire.

Cheaper furniture made of cheaper materials just won’t last the test of time, which means there is an increased possibility of it failing while on hire to a customer. The last thing anyone needs at a function or event is a chair collapsing under a guest or a table splintering and falling apart; it’s embarrassing for the customer and it’s embarrassing for us.

We use only high quality furniture made to exacting standards to prevent this from happening. While we do make recommendations like covering our banqueting tables with tablecloths for formal events, we know that their solid construction with a single piece of wood for the tabletop ensures that they will be able to used again and again.

Cutting Delivery Costs

A question we get frequently asked by customers looking to cut costs is if they can collect furniture hire from us, rather than having it delivered. As much as we understand why we are asked this, our experience has taught us that collection from our warehouse is not the economising move that people think it is.

The two main reasons we have for not allowing self-collection comes down to insurance.

From our perspective our warehouses and hubs are not set up for customer collection, which in turn makes our insurers unhappy to insure us against any accidents that may happen to a customer when making a collection.

Insurance is a problem from a customer perspective too. Furniture like most hire items is most likely to get damaged in transit, which means a customer needs to have insurance to protect them against this circumstance from happening. Most regular car insurance doesn’t cover this kind of thing, which means that if damage occurs to our furniture during transit, then the cost of repair or replacement comes out of the customer’s pocket directly. This isn't a situation we want our customers or ourselves to find us in.

Time and effort is another factor, particularly with furniture. For example, while banqueting tables do fold flat, the size of the table tops make them impossible to fit into ordinary cars. Not bringing the right kind of vehicle to collect furniture costs everyone time and effort that needn’t have been wasted. It can also force a customer to hire a van or similar, which is almost always at a much higher cost than the original delivery and collection would have been.

Making your furniture hire cheap

Despite all of the above, at Expo Hire UK we have done what we can to help reduce your costs when ordering furniture hire from us.

For example, by creating a website where you can book, amend and track your orders online we have reduced our costs and passed the savings on where we can. All of our pricing is shown online along with stock availability, reducing the need for quotations and the staff at our end that would require.

Likewise, unlike many other event hire companies we do not charge a damage deposit, and include for free on every order a slight damage waiver. This reduces the amount of cashflow required when placing an order, helping to keep you within budget.

We might not offer cheap table and chair hire but we do promise you we offer you the best prices possible.