Extraordinary awaits at Croke Park Meetings & Events in Dublin where the venue completely reimagined its key events spaces and upgraded their digital and network infrastructure to be voted Best Purpose Built Venue at the Event Industry Awards. Their award-winning in-house events team offer a powerhouse of innovative ideas to take events to the next level.

An iconic Dublin landmark, Croke Park is located in the heart of Dublin city, a 15-minute drive from top transatlantic hub Dublin Airport and 5 minutes from the city centre. The venue is easily accessible from the M50 and the Port Tunnel and offers 600 free parking spaces.

The re-imagination at Croke Park featured the launch of Ireland’s first high-density WiFi deployment with the network operating across the meeting and events spaces for visitors and organisers. This ultra-fast high-density Wi-Fi infrastructure can support up to 40,000 devices and was a first for venues in Ireland. Connectivity developments continue apace at the venue with these capacities set to more than double over the coming months!

The stadium venue offers meeting and event planners a total event solution in a sustainable venue that includes catering, AV, entertainment, event tech, unique time-out activities and 4-star hotel accommodation. With 110 meeting and event spaces, the venue can cater for a board meeting for 10 or a reception for 2,000 and the campus combines more unique attractions, tour and time-out options than any other venue.

The Ericsson Skyline offers a 17 storey rooftop walkway with breathtaking views around the capital and for adrenaline junkies, the Skyline abseil takes you from the roof right down into the stadium bowl below. The campus features the GAA Museum and Stadium Tours, dressing room pep talks and healthy pursuits such as the Stadium Steps Challenge – all in a day’s work!

Croke Park is a recognised trailblazer in sustainability best practice.  It was the first stadium to obtain certification to the international Environmental Standard ISO 14001:2015 and the ISO 20121 for Sustainable Event Management Systems and has maintained 0% waste to landfill for the last four consecutive years. The venue has award-winning operations and events teams and took the Best In-house Events Team at the Event Industry Awards for two consecutive years in 2016 and 2017 and the Best Purpose Built Venue Award at the same awards in 2017.

No two events are alike at Croke Park and the flexible spaces feature over 5,000 square metres of event space including a range of meeting rooms right up to the All Star Suites. The Hogan Suite is the flagship event space accommodating up to 2,000 for a reception or 800 for a theatre-style conference. It is brimming with high tech features including motorised trussing and dramatic LED lighting with natural daylight pouring through its 6m floor to ceiling windows. Its luxury foyer overlooks the hallowed playing ground below and bespoke pieces of Irish art evoke the history of the stadium making the foyer a dramatic settling for receptions, registration, exhibitions or refreshment breaks.

In 2017 the team at Croke Park developed the Event of the Future and hosted 300 corporate, association and agency event professionals to explore the power of live events and how they are evolving. The key take outs were that while events will continue to be immersive, engaging and technology-driven, face-to-face is going nowhere and in fact, the more sophisticated our tech, the more we’ll crave the tactical reassurance of real people, real places and real time.

Catering is central to the Croke Park Meetings & Events offering and menus are designed to complement every occasion and accommodate discerning palates and the expanding range of dietary requirements. The menus feature emerging superfoods, healthy indulgences and genuine farm to fork practices. Executive chef Ruairí says “there’s one golden thread linking everything we do – the provenance of our product. It’s all sourced as locally as possible from suppliers with whom we’re on first name terms. Farm to fork may be a bit of a gastronomic cliché but it’s the aspiration and inspiration for all we do at Croke Park.”

Popular menus include their Working Lunch offering, a new concept Stadium Street Food menu and Healthy Options which include nutritional information.

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Adam Parry
Author: Adam Parry

Adam is the co-founder and editor of www.eventindustrynews.com Adam, a technology evangelist also organises Event Tech Live, Europe’s only show dedicated to event technology and the Event Technology Awards. Both events take place in November, London.