- Product
- Venue managers
Venue managers
Principles
Occupancy is the business
For a venue, the calendar is the product. Everything else follows from whether the right rooms are full on the right days.
Never sell a room twice
Double booking should be structurally impossible, not carefully avoided. That means one calendar for every space, including the holds.
Capacity depends on the setup
A room seats one number as a banquet and another in theatre style. Record both and a booking that cannot work is refused at the point of sale.
Operations run on the same record
The team setting the room should be reading the booking, not a printout of it. One record, many views, no transcription.
Show, do not describe
A floor plan a client can open and comment on removes more back-and-forth than any amount of explanation in an email.
A booking is often several days
Build, event and strike belong to one job. Treating them separately breaks both the calendar and the invoice.
Practices
Run every space off one calendar
Month, week and day across all rooms, colour-coded per event, so a busy week reads at a glance and gaps are obvious.
Record real capacity per setup type
Banquet, theatre, cabaret, reception. Define them once and store the true capacity for each, so the number is never a guess.
Block what cannot be sold
Maintenance, build days and provisional holds go on the calendar as blocks, so available means available.
Catch the clash on entry
Room conflicts are detected and named when the booking is made, rather than found by the operations team the week of.
Build the floor plan on the real room
Set the geometry once, then build layouts on it, clone them for the next booking, and snapshot before you change anything.
Keep the layouts you reuse
Save a working plan as a template and apply it, instead of redrawing the same wedding layout every spring.
Seat the guests
Import the guest list from a spreadsheet and place people at tables, with the tablescape stored against the layout.
Send a link, collect comments on the plan itself, and resolve them as they are handled.
Group the days of one event
Attach build, event and strike dates to a booking group so they move together and invoice as one job.