Kinnear Centre for Creativity & Innovation

A great setup for conducting events and promoting different interests

Beautiful location for a conference with all rooms having a magnificent view. The food and wait staff were quick and friendly. The food served was also tasty. It is only 4 stars due to the distance from Banff Town Centre.

Enjoyed the facility, including rooms,food, service and facilities.

The reception catering logistics were not thought through – the tables with food were lined up in the centre of the big room, parallel to the shorter edge of the room. There were plates at both ends of the line of tables, so naturally people formed two lines, which collided in the centre of the row of tables. There should be an obvious direction of movement for people, so traffic would flow smoothly. Posting big arrow signs with „This way” written on them is a cheap and simple solution.
The food tables should be spread out across the room for better access.
The utensils for lifting the food onto plates were clearly inappropriate, e.g. tongs for lifting thin sandwiches that bent and flipped upright between the tongs (a cake lifter would have been better, or just spreading out the sandwiches on the tray so they could be picked up by hand). Similarly, tongs were provided for crumbly pastries that fell apart when picked up. I saw several people drop the pastry to the floor when it crumbled into pieces. At the end of the reception, the floor near the tables was covered with food. Forks were provided for lifting fairly sticky cheese onto plates - cheese that would refuse to come off the fork even when wiped against the edge of the plate. Tongs would have been appropriate for the cheese cubes. Longer sticks of cheese were easier to take than the cubes, but the large wedges of cheese required cutting, which was not always easy on the crowded tray.
The basic lesson is to field-test the food before serving – test both the taste and the mechanics of taking and eating it standing up. This would have revealed that sauce-soaked soft sliders of pulled pork make for messy finger food.

Best conference facility on the planet. Loved it.