Dear fellow Eurovision fans and ticket holders of the London Eurovision Party 2020.

Thank you for your continued patience and perseverance in this uncertain and ever changing climate. As you may remember, in our last message we postponed the 2020 event to 2021 and had hoped to bring you a London Eurovision Party this year.

Since we last wrote to you, circumstances have changed yet again and it was terribly sad news to hear that our venue ‘home’, Café de Paris, was placed into financial administration and closed by the owners at the end of 2020. Presently we do not know what will happen to Café de Paris, or if this venue will even remain as an entertainment space in the future – it is just too early to tell.

Unfortunately this has impacted us resulting in further large financial losses to us as organisers. This event is not run by a large event promoter like LiveNation or AEG but instead by just us, 2 Eurovision fans, who invest our own capital to bring the event to the London stage and rely on ticket sales to cover the increasing costs year on year. Hotels, flights, venues, catering, production staff, backstage staff, lighting, staging, security are all paid for up front by us as organisers with the ticket money paid out some time after the event from Ticketweb. This is standard practice within the industry and it means your ticket money from the 2020 event has been held by Ticketweb since you bought the tickets and would only be released to us after we held the event. Refunds were available from us via Ticketweb since the postponement of the London Eurovision Party 2020.

We are explaining this, purely for transparency as we realise there have been comments on social media in relation to other events, where customers feel the organisers are holding onto their monies. This is simply not the case. In fact considerable financial outlay was already paid out by us as we were just 2 weeks away from the event when the UK was placed into lockdown and the pandemic worsened. Sadly some of these costs have been irrecoverable. Many of you have been extremely kind, supportive and understanding in your messages to us, emails, DMs, tweets and texts – and have asked how you can support us or even help recoup some of our losses. To those of you, thank you so much. This pandemic has affected everyone terribly and for those of you who have been so kind – it means a lot to us.

In light of the current guidelines from the UK Government, alongside the international travel restrictions and the situation across Europe it is with deep regret that we are not able to have the 13th London Eurovision Party in 2021. Furthermore, with the uncertainty regarding the venue, we have now no option but to formally cancel the London Eurovision Party.

This means that we will now instruct Ticketweb to process refunds to all of those with valid tickets. For those of you that had requested refunds previously, these were already processed via Ticketweb. You should expect to see the refund on your credit card/bank statement within 3-5 working days.

We would love to be in a position to say we ‘will’ return in 2022, but sadly with our large financial losses and uncertainty of a venue that meets our requirements, we are not in a strong enough position to say this yet. We will make a further announcement in regards to a 2022 event later this year.

For those of you who have asked how you can support us and help bring back a 2022 event, you will find a Justgiving link here https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/LEP2022 . We understand that you might not be in a position to do this but if you are and you would like to donate, thank you so very much. We are so proud of what we have achieved in our 12 years and being the longest running preview party. We desperately hope we can return and bring back a Eurovision party like no other.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our many Eurovision artists, accompanying delegations, and of course our fabulous hosts Nicki French & Paddy O’Connell who have been such tremendous supporters since the very beginning. Our thanks also go to the wonderful BBC Eurovision team who have been such a great support and friends!

Thank you to the fabulous team at escXtra for all the support and also to all our amazing friends who transform to dedicated volunteers and ensure the whole day and night runs smoothly, we couldn’t do it without you all. Finally, thank you to all of you who have bought tickets and supported the event over the last 12 years – this event was always by fans, for the fans!

We wish you all a safe and Happy Eurovision 2021 and we hope that we can all re-unite together safely in the not too distant future.

With our best wishes and sincere thanks

Kabir Naidoo & Russell Davies

London Eurovision Party organisers.