Expo Hire supplied furniture, gazebos and kitchen equipment for Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye over six consecutive years.
Expo Hire supplied furniture, gazebos and kitchen equipment for Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye over six consecutive years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
