There is a beautiful hall near us, an old hamstone barn, huge, with flagstone floors. if you whisper at one side of the room you can hear it at the other end.
Also, if you drop a drumstick on the floor, it sets off the noise level meter!
And when you do play, even ignoring the noise meter (which they seem to do), its pretty much like you expect to get if you turn the reverb up on everything
Indeed - they are either very bad at communicating, or very stupid, or very greedy, or some combination of all of the above.