Understanding the Rental Process

First time customers can sometimes be perplexed when they're confronted with what they consider to be an overpriced tent. For an inexperienced consumer, this perplexity is understandable. After all, a tent is just a tent, right? Well, the rental business has a little more depth than it is often given credit for. For us, a tent is not just a tent.

It doesn't set itself up

With any rental order there are a number of factors that the rental company has to take into account. For example, when a prospective customer calls and says that they’re looking for a tent for wedding reception of 100 people, we can’t simply chose a tent that fits 100 people. There’s much more to the process than that, and we need to take into account certain variables. Let’s look at the venue. Is the tent going to be installed on grass, pavement, or sand? Is the lawn graded so that we need to install custom flooring? In order to make sure a site is appropriate for a tent, experienced rental companies like B.C. Tent send over professional consultants to evaluate a property and to answer these important questions, among others. These are just a few of the many variables that we need to address in order to ensure a successful event.

It’s also important to consider the time it takes to actually install and take down a tent. For a small canopy, we typically plan for about an hour for installation. Larger tents (40x60 pole tents) are even more time consuming, taking about four hours on average to set up. We take pride in our meticulous installation and take-down processes, because lack of diligence and poor attention to details can lead to safety hazards for the customer and their guests.

When a tent is finally set up, whether it’s in a backyard for a BBQ or on a football field for a commencement ceremony, the customer expects the tent to look as good as possible, as do we. What’s often overlooked, however, is the amount of work that’s put in by rental companies to maintain the presentation of a tent and other items. In our warehouse we a have a room that’s solely devoted to cleaning and caring for our tents. From our experience, most customers don’t quite understand the amount of work that goes into maintenance. If you owned a tent yourself, you would have to spend many hours bleaching it to keep it white and mildew free, and you would also need a place to store the tent and all of its components. But when you rent, that’s all taken care of.

I've covered a bunch of information here, but this is only beginning to scratch the surface. There's the interaction with event planners, the process of sub-renting equipment, and other things to take care of. If you're really interesting in learning more about what we do, feel free to give us a call. 1-800-586-TENT

www.bctent.com