Venues of Excellence (VOE) is celebrating adding thirteen new venues to its portfolio over the past 12 months, with a 94% retention in its current membership.
The latest additions include: Horwood House, IXL Centre, Old Thorns Hotel, Lilleshall House and Gardens, The studio Birmingham, The HAC, Hilton Garden Inn Silverstone, and MTC Liverpool.
Its new membership year has also started with the addition of the Old Thorns Hotel and Resort, which is set in 400 acres of picturesque Hampshire countryside with conference and event space up to 500 delegates, complemented by an 18-hole golf course, health club and spa.
VOE CEO Mandy Jennings said: “We are extremely proud of the membership year performance and it’s so heart-warming to see such a fantastic range of unique businesses joining our wonderful family of excellent, independent venues. Our sales and marketing activity has reaped great rewards this year with the highest level of confirmed business we have ever seen in our 30-year history as a consortium, which means our member venues receive both ROI and benefit as we can continue to invest in our business by attending more events, exhibitions and continually focus on new initiatives to support our members.
“For example, one of the key focus areas for our venues is excellence and quality which led us to revitalise our Quality Strategy. We were delighted to partner with David Vaughton, one of our past VOE Chairs and Principal Consultant of Vaughton Solutions, to put this key initiative in place. This means we offer all our members a complimentary quality assessment along with a report of best practice and recommendations from David. This has been really well received by our members and means we can credibly shout about our venues being excellent in service and product.”
Over the past year the VOE Learning and Development Academy in partnership with Paje Consultancy has also extended its range of online training courses bespoke to the hospitality sector. Member venues have welcomed the courses to refresh teams’ best practice, help with new staff members coming into hospitality as a career, especially designed for our conference engine room and operational teams, to develop the skills within their venues.
Venues of Excellence now represents over 45 venues in the UK, from dedicated learning and development training centres to unique sporting venues, residential conference spaces to private clubs.
