My flight landed at Chaudhary Charan Singh Airport a little after 4 PM, which gave me just enough daylight to see the city on the drive in before Lucknow's evening traffic started thickening around Hazratganj. I'd flown in a day early — something I've learned to do for any offsite I'm running solo, because the one time I didn't, I spent the morning of the actual session troubleshooting a projector instead of reviewing my notes. This time I had a full evening free before the training started, and Hazratganj turned out to be a fairly good place to have one.
Day One: Arriving Early on Purpose
The cab dropped me near the GPO crossing, and even at that hour the area hadn't slowed down — office staff heading home, a chai stall doing brisk business outside the old Novelty Cinema building, a couple of Chikankari showrooms still pulling in customers before closing. I hadn't been to Lucknow before, and my only real reference point going in was that this was where the training would happen, nothing more. Walking two blocks from the hotel to scope out the venue changed that fairly quickly.
I was there to run a two-day sales enablement training for a regional team — about 35 people, most flying or driving in from Kanpur, Varanasi, and a couple from Delhi. I'd picked asar Capoors Banquet Hall in Sushanpura mainly off a shortlist my ops team sent over, and the deciding factor at the time was simple: it fit our headcount without being oversized, and it was close enough to a hotel that half the group could walk over for sessions instead of needing a shuttle arranged.
I did a walkthrough that evening, mostly out of habit. The hall was air-conditioned and already cool by the time I got there, which mattered because Lucknow in that stretch of the year doesn't cool down much after sunset. The Wi-Fi held up when I tested it against my laptop and phone at the same time, which sounds like a small thing until you've run a session where half the room can't load the slide deck. I also asked about the breakout room, since day two of the training needed the group split for role-play exercises, and the venue coordinator walked me through it without any back and forth — it was already blocked off for us.
Dinner that first night was at a place a colleague back home had insisted I try — Tundey Kebab, a short walk from where I was staying. I hadn't expected a kebab shop to live up to that much hype, but it did. The galouti kebabs arrived within minutes of ordering, and the place had that particular energy of somewhere that's been doing exactly one thing well for a very long time and sees no reason to change it. I made a mental note to bring the team back the next evening, assuming day one didn't run too long.
Day Two: Running the Session
The actual training day started at 9:30, and by 9:15 most of the group had already trickled in — a few from the hotel two minutes away, a few by cab from other parts of the city. Registration took about ten minutes, which is faster than most venues I've worked with, mostly because the seating had already been arranged the way I'd asked for it the night before — a horseshoe layout for the morning session, meant to shift into smaller pods after lunch.
The morning block covered product positioning and objection handling, and I'll admit the first ninety minutes are always the hardest to keep a room engaged through, especially with people who flew in that same morning and are running on airport coffee. The air conditioning staying steady through the morning helped more than I expected — I've run sessions in venues where the AC cuts out by 11 AM once the room fills up, and there's nothing that kills momentum faster than a room slowly getting warmer while you're trying to hold attention.
Lunch was scheduled for 1 PM, and this is where I'd budgeted more time than usual, mostly because I'd read that the area around Hazratganj was worth a slower break rather than a rushed one. The catering ran on live counters rather than a fixed buffet line, which meant people weren't all queuing at once, and it also meant the chaat counter became an unplanned second dessert stop for at least half the room. A few people used the extra time to walk over to Ram Asrey a few minutes away — someone came back with a box of Malai Gilori that got passed around the afternoon session, which did more for the room's energy than my post-lunch icebreaker slide was going to.
The afternoon moved into the breakout rooms for role-play practice, splitting the group into three smaller sessions running in parallel. This is usually the part of any training that either works well or falls apart depending entirely on whether the venue has the actual space for it, and here it didn't feel improvised — the breakout rooms were already set up with enough separation that the three groups weren't talking over each other, which isn't always guaranteed even in venues that advertise breakout space.
By 5 PM we wrapped, and I'll admit the day had gone better than the version I'd planned for on paper — largely because nobody was distracted by a warm room, a spotty connection, or scrambling to find lunch within the scheduled hour.
The Evening
I'd told the team the night before about Tundey Kebab, and about eight of us ended up walking over after the session, since it was close enough that nobody needed to arrange transport. Two more places came up over dinner that I hadn't planned for — someone mentioned the Royal Café for biryani, which a few people peeled off to try instead, and someone else wanted to see the old Novelty Cinema building up close since her grandmother had apparently mentioned it once, decades ago, as somewhere she'd gone on dates before getting married. Small detail, but it stuck with me — this wasn't a city any of us had a real connection to going in, and by dinner on day one, at least one person had found an accidental family thread running through it.
Parking and cabs weren't really an issue that evening, since most of the group was staying within walking distance of both the venue and the food. The one team member who'd driven in from Kanpur mentioned the valet arrangement at the hall had made her day easier too — she hadn't had to think about where to leave her car for the two days, which she said was a first for a work trip in a city she didn't know.
The Extra Morning
My flight back wasn't until the evening of day three, which gave me a free morning I hadn't originally planned to use for anything beyond checking emails. Two colleagues who were in the same position — flights not until later — asked if I wanted to see Bara Imambara before heading to the airport, and I'm glad I said yes instead of catching up on inbox backlog from a hotel room.
It's a short enough drive from Hazratganj that we didn't need to build in extra travel buffer, which mattered since none of us wanted to risk missing a flight over a monument, however impressive. The scale of the place is hard to describe secondhand — the central hall is enormous, built without iron or wood supports according to the guide we picked up at the entrance, and the Bhulbhulaiya, the maze-like upper passages, took us close to forty minutes to properly walk through. It's the kind of thing that's easy to skip on a work trip because it feels like "tourist stuff," and also exactly the kind of thing you end up telling people about months later, long after the actual training content has blurred together in memory.
We got back to the hotel with enough time for a quick lunch before heading to the airport, and on the drive out, one of my colleagues said something that stuck — that this was the first work trip in a while that hadn't felt like "just an airport and a conference room." I hadn't set out to build that into the training, but Hazratganj made it easy to happen almost by accident.
What I'd Do Differently Next Time
If I ran this training again — and I likely will, since the regional team asked whether we could make it an annual thing — I'd build the extra day in deliberately instead of leaving it to chance. I'd also confirm boardroom-versus-theatre seating configurations further in advance, since our headcount sat comfortably within the venue's range but I hadn't actually specified which layout I wanted until the walkthrough the night before, which worked out but was closer than I'd have liked.
I'd also tell anyone booking a similar event to ask directly about accommodation packages if the group is flying in from multiple cities — we booked hotel rooms separately this time, and coordinating check-ins across three different arrival times was more work than it needed to be. A single arrangement covering the venue, catering, and stay would have saved at least two phone calls a day in the lead-up.
A Last Thought
I've run enough of these trainings in enough cities to know that most of them blend together afterward — same slide decks, same hotel conference rooms, same rushed lunches eaten at a desk between sessions. This one didn't, and it wasn't because of anything dramatic. It was a room that stayed cool through a long afternoon, a lunch break long enough to actually leave the building, a kebab shop two minutes from the hotel, and a free morning that turned into forty minutes lost in a four-hundred-year-old maze before a flight home. None of that was on the training agenda. All of it is what the team actually remembered when they thanked me for organizing the trip.
