LOL.. your post is I'm afraid rather predictable, but thank you anyway for highlighting the positives...
1.) There were a large number of couples booked on LUX who saw it as an opportunity to book with their husbands/partners as a way to encourage them into the dance scene in a luxury environment, as they simply wouldn't go to a Pontins w/e. And even though we were told that many of them would participate in the classes as we were running many foundation level classes in different dance styles that they could participate in, we were concerned that if they didn't participate this would leave us with a gender imbalance. So on this basis we ensured that we had additional guys on hand to help out.
2.) As you quite rightly point out, these guys weren't given 'free' places at all. Instead they were offered delegate packages on the basis that they work on our behalf in the classes to offer the flexibility of enhanced gender balancing on an ad-hoc basis. That's a barter system where someone accepts work on the basis that they receive a benefit - that's not 'free'.
3.) Again as you quite rightly say, we had organized the teachers and crew into a cohesive unit that helped each other out to create the best gender balance we could get at a moments notice.
4.) As has already been pointed out, no matter how well a weekender event is gender balanced you simply can't force people to participate in all the classes. This means in any class you will have a disparity of men to ladies because it just simply depends on who decides to turn up for each class.
5.) And lastly, the biggest problem we had with a gender balance was on the Sunday, because with it being a work day the next day we had no way of knowing how many people would go home early. So this year we are running it on a Bank Holiday weekend to cover as many variables as we can.
So what you have just highlighted is that we have always been happy to forego profit on the basis of running the best weekender we can, that we managed the event to the best of our ability given a large number of variables and that we have learned from our experience of running our first event to ensure the greatest success for all those concerned on our next event. And we have done this by offering a huge range of packages to cater for as many people as possible, by promoting offsite accommodation and by changing the date of the weekend.
So hopefully you can now pick yourself up off the floor because I'm sure it's quite cold down there...
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