Mobile World Congress 2027. Four days that take the city over.

Fira Gran Via is a well run modern exhibition centre with a metro line to the door, and on a normal week nothing about it is difficult. The difficulty is density. Roughly a hundred thousand people arrive within the same two hours each morning and try to leave within the same forty minutes each evening, and the venue sits on the far side of the city from most of the hotels. The taxi rank at half past six on the Tuesday is a genuinely famous sight.

For someone doing eight meetings a day, half of them in hotel suites in the Eixample or Diagonal rather than on the stand, the cost of that is measured in missed conversations. A car and a chauffeur held for the day fixes it: the car stages near the venue, you agree a pick up point that is not the main entrance, and you leave when you are ready instead of when the queue allows. Odyssey's own cars and chauffeurs are in London and Manchester; in Spain cars are arranged through operators we know, with one person here responsible for the itinerary.

El Prat is close to the venue and handles business aviation, and for most parties it is the obvious answer. The thing to plan around is that the congress compresses arrivals into the Sunday afternoon and departures into Wednesday evening and Thursday, so slots and aircraft parking are the scarce commodity rather than the flight itself. Ask about parking and slots at the same time as the aircraft. From London the sector is around two hours and comfortably inside a light or midsize aircraft.

If the aircraft needs to sit for several days, or if El Prat is full, there are smaller fields around Catalonia and coastal airports within a reasonable drive, and repositioning the aircraft empty is often cheaper and simpler than paying for it to wait in the wrong place. We will lay out those options rather than assume. See how charter works.