29.06.2018 Magazin , Mittschiffs

Floating event venue

Ever thought of chartering a whole ship?

MS RheinEnergie, MS RheinFantasie, MS RheinPoesie, MS Loreley, MS Asbach: these five as well as all other members of the KD fleet are more than excursion ships – they are floating event venues and provide an extraordinary setting for events of all kinds. Many organisers appreciate this and are moving their events to the river. One such organisers are Rico Fenoglio and Walter Düren from Wanted GmbH. They are a regular guest on board with their well-known “after-job party”.

A late Saturday afternoon in early May. Hundreds of people are patiently queuing up on the banks of the Rhine in Bonn at the foot of the opera house. They all have one destination: the KD MS RheinFantasie. Today, like many other ships, it is sailing on a very special voyage. It is the evening of “Rhein in Flammen” (“Rhine in Flames”) in Bonn, and while hundreds of thousands of people are gathering on the banks of the Rhine in the city to marvel at the pyrotechnicians’ blazing works of art after dark, MS RheinFantasie will sail along the Rhine with about four dozen other ships in a brightly lit convoy.

Today, however, it is not in the service of KD, but operating as a charter ship. Party organisers Rico Fenoglio and Walter Düren have booked it to relocate their successful after-job party to the water once again and to offer their guests a party experience in a class of its own by taking part in the Rhine in Flammen ship convoy.

Only possible on board

Fenoglio and Düren are repeat offenders when it comes to chartering ships. For 18 years, the successful party organisers have been a guest at various venues in Cologne and Bonn with their after-job party – also regularly on ships, and they have good reasons for this:

“A ship like this can simply offer people something that no other venue can... soon as the weather is good everyone goes out onto the open deck, dances and enjoys the view of the city passing by. You can’t do that anywhere else”.

Rico Fenoglio - Party organizer

The right ship for everyone

Like Rico Fenoglio, many organisers have already discovered the KD ships for themselves. But it doesn’t always have to be party time on board. “We have a wide variety of customers here in the charter sector”, reports Andreas Albani from the KD charter team. “And this means that very different types of events take place on our ships”. On the smaller ships in the fleet, these are mainly private celebrations such as weddings, special birthdays or other family parties. The larger ships are popular with companies that want to offer employees, customers or business partners a special setting for parties, presentations, incentives and so on.

In addition to these occasions when the chartered ships are only accessible to a closed group of people, it is also possible to rent a KD ship for a public event. The great thing about it: the ship comes as an all-inclusive, worry-free package. This means: catering, drinks, service staff, furniture, event equipment – everything can be included if required. At the same time, organizers like Rico Fenoglio enjoy maximum flexibility; they can set up additional dance floors, for example, decorate all areas of the ship to their heart’s content or – as the radio station WDR2 regularly does for its house parties – even transform the ship into a fully furnished apartment. Promotions, themed food stations, game consoles, video walls on board? Anything is possible.

A wealth of event experience, excellent equipment

Charter customers benefit from the fact that KD itself has been organising a wide array of events for decades. A look at the timetable or the website www.k-d.com is enough to get an idea: there are lively party cruises with live music and DJs as well as dinner cruises with star chefs, chilled-out evening cruises or cultural events with an extensive stage programme. The modern event ships MS RheinEnergie and MS RheinFantasie are excellently equipped for all of these.

The approximately 1,000 guests at Rico Fenoglio’s Rhine in Flammen party on board the MS RheinFantasie have also noticed this: the sound is excellent, the dancefloor on the open deck is atmospherically lit, and the KD service staff ensure that no glass stays empty for long. And so the organisers and party people can be seen beaming along with the setting sun.

Heading for new shores

Fenoglio and Düren are so confident about the combination of party and ship that after more than 150 sold-out events in Cologne and Bonn they want to conquer another Rhineland metropolis with their after-job party on the water – and of course on a KD ship: on 21 June, MS RheinFantasie will be lifting its anchor on their behalf for the first time in Düsseldorf, followed by two further dates on 19 July and 16 August. And Fenoglio is sure that people here will flock to the Rhine to party too: “Like the people of Cologne and Bonn, the people of Düsseldorf love to party and love going to the Rhine. So we have the perfect event for them”.