Convene Hospitality Group (CHG) used IMEX to reveal its first venue in west London. Convene Rathbone, a 5,000 square metre space opposite Tottenham Court Road’s Elizabeth Line station, marks a deliberate step beyond the brand’s City of London heartland, with a ground-floor arrival experience designed to bring in everything from car launches to fashion activations. CMW sat down with Jane Hague, director UK sales, and Jim O’Donnell, global VP enterprise strategy, to hear the news first – along with what else is in the pipeline for one of the events industry’s fastest-growing venue brands.
IMEX may have only run for three days, but for CHG it felt more like a victory lap. Speaking to CMW on the show floor, Hague and O’Donnell were in no mood to play down the buzz around their stand.
“We’ve had two days where we’ve just had an incredible amount of people, not just pre-booked appointments,” said Hague. “We’ve had the largest number of pre-booked appointments of any show at IMEX so far, so that’s a great tick, but also just that serendipity of these shows – people coming off the aisles, looking at our stand, saying, ‘tell us more about you.’”
Jane Hague
The numbers backed up the feeling. Scanned visitors were, in Hague’s words, blowing the team away. “Now our job is to deliver the ROI, of course,” she added, with the kind of pragmatism that suggested the celebrating would be brief. “So the work comes in.”
O’Donnell, meanwhile, was fresh from his own kind of homecoming. He had spent four years with Convene from 2018 before stepping away, returning in March 2025. “A little over a year,” he confirmed, in the manner of someone still mildly surprised to find himself back at the same desk.
A new address for Convene
The real headline, though, broke first to CMW. Convene was launching its first venue in west London: Convene Rathbone, a 5,000 square metre space directly opposite Tottenham Court Road’s Elizabeth Line station.
It marked new territory in more ways than one. Convene’s London portfolio had, until then, stayed firmly within the City. Rathbone changed that. “It’s going to put a brand new footprint for Convene in a completely different part of London,” said Hague, “and, for us, open up the possibility of hosting different types of buyers and use cases, being in a slightly different location to the City.”
Early renders pointed to a striking ground-floor arrival experience – one with genuine street-level brand visibility, and, notably, room for cars to be driven straight into the space. It was a first for the brand, and one that opened the door to the automotive sector, along with retail, fashion and the arts – all of which sit more naturally in west London than in the Square Mile.
It was never going to be a carbon copy of the existing portfolio, either. “It will be, let’s say, Convene with a nod to the type of business that we see will take place in that venue, which might become more production-heavy,” Hague explained. The brief leaned into what Convene’s chief executive called a “flight to experience” – clients spending more on production, technology and branding, and wanting their event space to reflect it.
Rathbone would be Convene’s sixth London venue, sitting alongside six etc.venues properties in London and one in Manchester – kept, Hague confirmed, as a deliberately separate brand. Inside, there was a 741-capacity plenary hall ringed by a substantial gallery space, in the same vein as Convene Sancroft at St Paul’s, plus multiple breakout areas. As Hague put it, with the air of someone who had said it more than once but still meant it: “content is king.”
Building blocks that travel
Behind the glossy renders sat something more useful to clients juggling events across cities: consistency. “It helps our clients who use us across cities or across countries – they know what to expect,” said O’Donnell. Each venue reflected its own local culture and history, but the space typology stayed familiar. “A hall at Rathbone will have a similar configuration to a hall at Sancroft or a hall at 30 Hudson Yards in New York City. And a forum can accommodate a certain amount of people, and a hub is a great space for a breakout.”
For series events, roadshows or annual conferences moving between cities, that predictability was doing a lot of quiet work.
Beyond the boardroom: Mallory and Aperture
Rathbone wasn’t the only growth story. Following the acquisition of the NeueHouse brand earlier in the year, Convene had added three new venues in New York, including 555 Broadway, its first Soho location, which had opened the previous month.
Jim O’Donnell
Two further standalone event venues were to follow. The Mallory was set to open that autumn – “more of a raw space, but with services and built-in infrastructure to make plug-in for production quite easy,” said O’Donnell – with the Aperture, a second standalone venue, due in January 2027.
The thinking was straightforward enough: clients who already trusted Convene with their daytime meetings had, until then, taken their evening galas, product launches and celebrations elsewhere. “We’ve had these great clients who use us for all of their daytime, but they have these other amazing, special, immersive, and experiential events that we know we could handle well on their behalf, and they’d like to put the spend with us because we’re important partners for their business,” said O’Donnell. A specially trained social sales team had been brought in specifically for these venues – weddings and bar and bat mitzvahs included, though neither looked likely to turn up at a Convene any time soon.
No sign of slowing down
Asked whether the company’s chief executive, Ryan Simonetti, showed any sign of easing off, the answer came with a smile rather than a straight face. “Hopefully he doesn’t,” said O’Donnell. “It’s a lot of fun.” Growth in North America in particular – including New York’s Mallory and Aperture – was something the team was actively encouraging rather than merely tolerating.
As for where Convene might land next, that decision started with the clients rather than a map. “One of the great conversations we have this week is: where should we be?” said O’Donnell. “So we’re talking to clients and partners and getting their feedback and interest, and then we go back and we share that with our growth team and the real estate team, and then it’s a data-informed process.” The research followed; the instinct, more often than not, came first from the people already booking the rooms.
The Convene difference
So what kept clients coming back? For O’Donnell, it came down to focus. “I think it comes down to the ability to just focus on connecting,” he said. With audio-visual, production and culinary all handled in-house, clients were freed up to concentrate on their event’s actual purpose – training, investor meetings, public-facing launches – “and they leave the rest to us.”
Hague, who joined Convene after a career spanning some of the industry’s largest venues, including Excel London, brought a useful vantage point to that pitch. “I’ve got a good handle on the highly complex productions through to the high-touch boardroom C-suite, and everything in between,” she said. “I’ve peeked through the curtains of many different brands in my twenty-five-plus years in this industry.”
That perspective, she suggested, was exactly what Convene had built on: spaces designed with as much thought given to how they feel as to how they function logistically. “Convene’s really plugged a gap to deliver something that puts as much into the design and how you feel when you come into a space as it does into the functionality of it logistically.”
What comes next?
More cities, said O’Donnell, simply. Hague pointed to the arrival of Convene’s new global svp of brand, Jacque Riley, as the next chapter in telling that story more clearly to the wider industry. “We’re at the start of that journey,” she said. “We’re super excited with what we’re seeing behind the scenes that I can’t wait to share with the industry.”
Convene’s news, it was fair to say, rarely stayed quiet for long – and Rathbone, Mallory and Aperture suggested the pace wasn’t about to change. With six venues now confirmed for London alone and standalone event spaces taking root across New York, Convene was no longer simply expanding its footprint. It was redefining what clients should expect from a meetings venue in the first place – and daring the rest of the market to keep up.
