Six years at Hay Festival

Expo Hire supported Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye for six consecutive years. The festival runs for ten days and draws tens of thousands of visitors to a rural site in Wales. The organisers needed a hire partner that could help build a working event site and support it through the full programme.

Why hire from Expo Hire

• The only hire company in the UK that delivers and collects on Sundays. Morning and afternoon windows available every day of the year, including Bank Holidays.
• Live GPS tracking on every delivery and collection. A tracking link and SMS ETA are sent on delivery morning. No other UK hire company offers this for both directions.
• Every order 100% guaranteed before you pay. Stock and logistics are confirmed at the point of booking. No substitutions or shortfalls on the day.
• No security deposit on any order. No damage deposit, no money held back — ever.
• Free Minor Damage Waiver on every order. Accidental breakages during normal event use are covered at no extra charge.
• Choose morning or afternoon for delivery and collection independently. Your schedule, your venue, your window.
• 11 regional depots across England and Wales. Orders route automatically from the nearest depot to your venue.

The brief covered hospitality seating, site cover and kitchen equipment for food vendors. That mix matters at a festival of this size. Guests need places to sit, eat and meet between sessions. Traders need cover, prep space and reliable catering kit. The site team also needs deliveries and collections that fit a live programme with many operators on the ground at the same time.

What we supplied

• Furniture for hospitality seating areas
• Gazebos for cover across the site
• Kitchen equipment for food vendors
• Support stock for service and back-of-house use

How we handled the site

Hay-on-Wye brings a different set of logistics from a city venue. The roads are smaller, the site sits on open ground and the programme runs across ten days. Expo Hire planned phased delivery and collection to match the festival build, trading period and breakdown. Our team worked around other operators on site so vendors, hospitality teams and organisers could keep their own schedules.

Outdoor festival hire also demands practical judgement. Ground conditions affect where crews can unload and how structures sit. Weather changes the pace of a build and the type of cover a site needs. Our team planned for those factors from the start, so the organisers had shelter, furniture and kitchen kit that matched the site conditions.

The six-year relationship shows the value of consistency. Festival programmes change from year to year, but the site still needs the same standard of delivery, setup and collection. Expo Hire brought that consistency back each season, which helped the organisers run a busy rural event with less friction.

What festival hire needs

An outdoor festival needs a hire company that understands weather, access and phased logistics. You need stock that suits open ground, crews that can work around other contractors and a schedule that holds across a long event. That is how a temporary site keeps working from day one to the last collection.

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