Village Hotels
40% booking conversion across 34 hotels
Village Hotels has 34 hotels across Scotland, England and Wales, and has plans to open three more as Blackstone supports their rapid expansion. Each property mixes modern rooms with loads of space for meetings and events, from small pods for two people that you can hire by the hour to suites that can fit up to 600 guests. Across all properties, Village Hotels hosts more than 36,000 events a year and gets around 100,000 guests through the doors during the Christmas season alone.
Background
Village Hotels came to iVvy after outgrowing a sales and catering system that Natasha Pemberton, who's been in sales at Village for 16 years, describes as "a bit one-dimensional".
The previous system was built for a narrower kind of business than Village runs – a mix of corporate day meetings, hourly room hire, weddings, private banqueting and ticketed public events – and it couldn't adapt to fit their needs. "Everything was off the shelf, in terms of the tech stack that they had," Natasha says.
Quotes and contracts were built by hand, which took about 15 to 20 minutes per booking. Reminders and follow-up tasks were tracked manually rather than automatically. After about a year of working with their old provider, the team realised they needed something more flexible. "We can't manage our business the way that we do," Natasha says of that first system.
Village put out a tender and picked iVvy. Natasha says the decision was swayed by iVvy's product and team flexibility. iVvy's team were keen to configure the system to fit Village's needs and work with them over time to keep building it.
"It was, OK, well we'll work with you, we'll build the system with you, we'll configure it, and then we'll work with you regularly on updates," she says. "I think what made iVvy stand apart was how nimble you were as a brand."
iVvy Solution
Village signed with iVvy and had every hotel live within two months. iVvy's implementation partner delivered face-to-face training, hotel by hotel, across the country, and the team credits that hands-on rollout with getting 140 active users comfortable with the new system quickly. "It was weeks. It was a really fast turnaround for us," Natasha says.
Since then, Village has built out iVvy way beyond the initial deployment. During the pandemic, Natasha used the industry's downtime to rebuild templates and tighten processes so the estate could come back stronger once venues reopened. Even a simple day meeting used to take almost as much effort to plan as a larger event. "That's definitely one of the things that was taking up quite a lot of the team's time beforehand," she says. With iVvy's pre-built event templates, coordinators can turn a session-heavy enquiry into a proposal in a few clicks. Automated tasks send enquiries to a phone call or a follow-up email, depending on the status, to keep the reactive sales process moving, even as more enquiries arrive by email for Village Hotels than by phone.
The operations team recently replaced paper banquet event orders and clipboards with virtual BEOs. "We like a process in Village. I think at the scale that we're at now, we have to have processes in place, and keeping that discipline of every booking has a BEO is working for us," she says. A ticketed events capability inside iVvy came as a bonus rather than something Village asked for during initial discovery. "That wasn't certainly in our discovery, but that was good. We can manage our ticketed events within the tech stack of iVvy," Natasha says, where previously the hotels relied on a separate supplier.
Digital contracts have changed how the team closes deals, too. "The quotes, the eProposals and the eContracts, has been a massive game changer for us," Natasha says. "At the end of the day, I'm a salesperson, so I love getting a signed contract back from a customer, and to get that notification to say the customer's signed is really satisfying."
Village Hotels also uses iVvyAI, currently live for email-to-quote and venue directory listings across all 34 hotel inboxes, reading incoming enquiries and building them into quotes automatically.
Results
Overall enquiry-to-booking conversion rate
Users onboarded & trained within weeks
Contracts and BEOs generated each week
Implementing iVvy has changed how Village runs its sales and events operation, including:
- SLA-bound conversion rose from 20% to 30%: Natasha attributes the lift to efficiencies iVvy has put in place.
- Contracts close faster: Digital proposals and contracts replaced PDF-and-DocuSign workflows, and the team is notified the moment a customer views or signs. In a typical month, 116 users send eContracts and 67 send eProposals.
- Faster booking visibility: coordinators and managers can see status and value across the estate, rather than piecing it together manually.
- Operations consistent at scale: Over 100 users work from virtual BEOs each month, so operations teams have live information instead of paper printouts.
"I love how flexible you are as a brand in that you are always looking for what's next. The change in the last seven years since we've had iVvy has been amazing. I love the fact that there's always new releases coming out and that our feature requests always get listened to. We have a voice in the arena."
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