UK consortium Venues of Excellence has published a commitment from its members in how they will work towards providing the highest standards of hygiene and cleanliness, in doing so providing peace of mind for our customers, their teams and suppliers as the hospitality industry plan to reopen businesses over the next few months.
Venues of Excellence have throughout this time supported members with an array of informative webinars and virtual forums with key industry voices to help plan their recovery from COVID-19 and bringing the UK Events industry back to their venues.
The new commitment covers key areas that underpin the consortiums membership:
- Member Venues: Venues of Excellence will continue to share ongoing briefings to support ourmember venues Covid-19 awareness training and enhanced operating procedures.
- Customer Service: Venue teams of hospitality professionals are always dedicated to delivering outstanding customer care and ensuring the personal safety of clients and our staff. Venues will do their utmost to provide options for ease of payment to all guests and delegates.
- Conference and Meeting Rooms: Venues will adapt their capacities to manage the social distancing guidance, offer staggered meeting times, implement enhanced cleaning schedules, and recommend alternative delegate stationery and equipment.
- Guest Rooms: Venues will use cleaning and sanitising protocols to clean rooms after guests depart and before the next guest arrives. In addition, venues will evaluate their housekeeping schedules whilst resident.
- Public Spaces: Venues will increase the frequency of cleaning and sanitising in public spaces, manage the customer journey through the venues with a focus on using set entrances and exits, the counter at the welcome reception, lifts and lift buttons, door handles, public bathroom, room keys.
- Food and Beverage: Venues will review its food service style to deliver a contact free service (e.g. social distancing, use of PPE where appropriate and food and beverage delivery). In addition, wetheywill continue to adjust food and beverage service served to meeting rooms and guest room service, including bedroom tea/coffee supplies in accordance with current food safety recommendations.
- Back of House: Venues will be ensuring all our teams go through a robust training programme before returning to work and we will increase the frequency of cleaning, focussing on areas such as staff entrances, locker rooms, laundry rooms and staff offices to protect their team members. This includes providing a clear instruction for all suppliers delivering to venues and how such deliveries are handled.
Mandy Jennings (pictured), Executive Director at Venues of Excellence, said: “ At such an unprecedented time for the hospitality industry, the Venues of Excellence Team have worked to support our member venues and we are confident that our approach to this commitment will demonstrate that our venues continue to be quality led and customer driven, as we build the conference and events business once again. Over the past few weeks, our member venues have been working on their plans for reopening with venues such as Wyboston Lakes, Make Venues, Victory Services Club and Millennium Point now well on the way with sharing with their clients their plans on how they will manage their conferences, meetings and events. We have also seen great camaraderie within our members to best practices through our COVID-19 Resource Library. Clients choosing to work with our member venues will have the assurance of the Venues of Excellence brand and what we represent in the hospitality industry.”
For further information, visit www.venuesofexcellence.co.uk
