Brands, Ownership's and Clusters - An Explanation
What is a Venue Group?
A ‘Venue Group’ is an organisation that owns multiple venues, you will often see this with Hotels.
For example, Premier Inn is a hotel group which owns 800 venues across the UK.
Premier Inn is known as the ‘venue group’ and the 800 venues are part of their hotel group.
What is a Venue Brand?
The venue brand is the name above the door. Some venue groups just have one brand, for example, Apex Hotels and other venue groups will separate the venues in their group to appeal to different types of customers and they do this by creating ‘brands’.
For example, if we look at the hotel group Best Western Hotels and Resorts, this hotel group owns 13 brands and each brand is called something slightly different to attract different consumers based on their budget and style preferences.
The two screenshots below show you how a venue will appear in Endeavour where they only have one Brand with the same name as the Group and Accor where they have 30 brands under the Accor Group.
In Endeavour, you will see an arrow next to a Group name if they have more Brand Names in their portfolio.
Clicking on the arrow next to the Group Name will open up the list.
You must never create a new group/brand that is not the name above the door of a venue
What is the difference between a Parent and Child Group?
(not to be confused with how you actually create one in Endeavour as the terminology can be confusing)
We use the term ‘Parent’ and ‘Child’ to describe the hierarchy of a venue group and the brands within it.
‘Best Western Hotels and Resorts’ is known as the ‘Parent’ group because they have one or more venue brands.
Best Western Plus is one of the brands the organisation operates and is known as the ‘Child’ group because they come under Best Western Hotels and Resorts.
If you look at the screenshot above, Best Western Hotels and Resorts is at the top as it is the ‘Parent’ and all the ‘Child’ brands come under it.
In the scenario where you have a parent and child brand, no venues should be added at parent level.
Each venue should be added to the appropriate child brand.
If a hotel group does not have any brands then all of the venues will be added at the Parent level. For example Pentahotels operates all of its hotels under the one group/brand of Pentahotels so all of their venues will be added to the parent group Pentahotels.
Ownerships
There are several scenarios where the Ownership section will be populated for a venue.
An ownership can be used to display who actually owns a venue where it does not belong to any specific group/brand. The key group/brand for a venue will display as an Independent Venue on our database with the name of the hotel owner in the Ownership section.
A venue owner can pay a venue group (such as Best Western Hotel and Resorts, Hilton etc.) to use one of their brand names above the door of their own property. They would pay for the right to change the venue name, agree to operate their hotel in line with their chosen partner and display their logo, for example Best Western, usually through a franchise agreement. What this means is a Best Western venue may not actually be owned by Best Western themselves, instead the building is owned by someone else that pays as part of a franchise to have the Best Western name. In this case, the key Group/Brand would be Best Western and the Ownership field would display the Owning Company
An ownership could also apply to the scenario where a hotel owner pays a management group to manage the running of their hotels on their behalf. In this case the Key Group/Brand could be either Independent Venue or a Group e.g. Hilton and the Ownership would display the name of the management company, for example Interstate Hotels & Resorts.
Clusters
A cluster is a selection of venues grouped together for the purpose of giving one email address access to more than one venue listing on our system as some venues may have one email address for their meetings and events team that deals with enquiries for more than one venue.
In order to provide access to multiple venues, we create a cluster and then add the required email address as a Venue Group Manager to this cluster. This user will then have access to all of the venues within that cluster.
Although a user can only be attached once to either a venue, cluster, group or ownership, a venue can be attached to multiple clusters (although only one group or ownership).
How to edit/add and delete a group, ownership or cluster
Firsty, open Endeavour - https://endeavour.venuedirectory.com/home
(https://endeavour.venuedirectory.com/home)
Open the sidebar and click on ‘Groups’
From here you can search for any groups, ownerships and clusters, you can see what venues are in certain groups and find contacts associated with the group. You can also add and remove groups ownerships and clusters.
To add a new group, ownership or cluster click on ‘Add Group’ and then by clicking ‘select parent group’ you can choose to create a cluster, ownership or venue group from the drop down menu. In this example I will create a venue group and call it ‘Test’.
After you have selected the parent group go to ‘Group Name’ and type in what you want to call it. Then click on ‘Subscription Payment Type’ and select ‘invoice’.
l Click on ‘Organisation Type’ and choose one if you know it, if you are unsure select ‘Other’.
‘VAT Number’ can be ignored unless you know it.
‘Registered Number’ and ‘Registered Name’ are the company's details registered with the government. If you happen to know these, type it in however, if not you can type in ‘TBC’ instead which stands for To Be Confirmed.
Lastly, for ‘Sales Owner’ and ‘Renewal Owner’ select Graham Bintcliffe.
