Is it Christmas yet?


Hands up if you are fed up with the supermarkets putting up Christmas point-of-sale displays in September.

It seems that a lot of you are, judging by the comments and energy expelled on-line on this very topic. Whilst we share everyone’s concern that the Christmas season seems to be getting longer and longer each year and that it seems very wrong for there to be tinsel on display in a Summer month, we host a lot of Christmas Events each November/December at our venues.

We sent an email to those of you on our mailing list this week prompting you to book your Christmas Parties at our venues. The main body of the email expressed our own dislike of early supermarket christmas promotions but prompted people to start thinking about booking their Christmas events at our circuits.

I was out of the office for a couple of days and returned today to be told by our Group sales Manager that we had received “hundreds of negative responses” about our Christmas email. Naturally I was concerned. I knew that our email was slightly earlier than in previous years but we do come under a lot of pressure for dates in December and  lots of party organising committees will be starting to think about venues for their annual celebration during October.

So I looked into the responses we received. It turns out that we received 11 negative responses. Of those, I can identify two or three as being very much tongue in cheek, especially the ones that started with “Humbug”.

Of course, lots of people don’t bother replying to tell us that they disagree with us. They can simply un-subscribe from future emails or they can still accept our emails but be left with a slightly less positive view of Daytona.

It is never our intention to upset or annoy people with our communications so we would like to go on record here and now and confirm that Christmas isn’t until 25th December. If it helps, as a bloke, I can be relied upon to leave my own Christmas present shopping until Christmas Eve anyway!

Bah Humbug.

Jim Graham
Team Daytona