Celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee by recreating the winning Platinum Pudding

The Platinum Jubilee weekend is almost upon us, marking the Queen’s 70^th year on the throne. What are your plans? Whether you’re hosting back-to-back weddings or a themed celebration commemorating this significant milestone we hope you and your teams have some fun planned as we move into the summer months!

If you’re interested in whipping up a dessert to mark the occasion may we suggest the official Platinum Pudding, a Lemon Swiss Roll and Amaretti Trifle pudding?

This scrumptious dish consists of:

Swiss Roll

Lemon Curd 

St Clement’s Jelly

Custard 

Amaretti biscuits 

Chunky mandarin coulis

Find out more about the perfect celebratory summer treat and download the full recipe HERE. Happy baking from the Hostology team (we are yet to try the official dessert of Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee) but we are certain it won’t disappoint!

Sustainable Design: 4 Areas Any Venue Can Improve

As more and more couples start to prioritise sustainability, at Hostology we want to help venues find a way to improve their sustainability. It doesn’t have to be something as big as Elmore Court’s re-wilding project (even thought it is incredible). Below we have outlined 4 simple ways of improving your venues sustainability.

Reducing the impact your venue has on the environment, whilst improving the health and wellbeing of those spending time within it, are two endeavours that go hand in hand. 

With some small tweaks to the design of your rooms and other venue spaces, you can improve your guest experience, reduce your environmental footprint, and do so in a way that demonstrates to your visitors your commitment to sustainability. 

1. Invest in green alternatives

There is a time and a place for grand gestures, but when it comes to sustainable design the devil can just as often be in the detail.

For example: Consider switching to non-toxic, biodegradable paints when decorating rooms. These durable, breathable, low VOC options are better for your guests’ health, and the long term health of your walls. 

Other small but significant changes to your design could include switching to OLED lighting, greener cleaning products, and looking to recycled options when it comes to your paper products.

2. Switch to sustainable furnishings

When it comes to beds, mattresses, bedding and other furnishings, natural fibre and sustainable options have evolved significantly over the last decade. 

GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard) certified organic cotton sheets provide a sumptuous sleep environment for your guests and are manufactured with a much smaller impact on the environment, whilst simultaneously standing up far better to repeat washes. 

Mattresses crafted from natural materials such as organic coconut fibres, natural latex and organic wool, represent a hard-wearing and more breathable alternative to synthetic fibres. 

Naturalmat, Devon based makers of natural fibre beds and mattresses, have a range of industry leading options which combine carefully sourced organic fibres and hand-making techniques for a durable and supremely comfortable mattress.

3. Embrace smart technology

Although worth aspiring to, reducing energy consumption doesn’t have to mean vast rows of solar panels or other longer-term options. 

Lights and thermostats triggered by occupancy sensors have been commonplace in hospitality for some time, and have advanced to iron out some of their early teething issues.

Considering that a typical hotel room can be unoccupied nearly 70% of the time, these energy management systems can have a big impact on unnecessary consumption.

4. Encourage your guests

Whilst there is plenty that venues can do to minimise their own environmental impact, there are sustainable design decisions that can help your guests reduce theirs too.

Gentle reminders to turn off lights, reuse towels and other more sustainable choices are more acceptable as awareness of climate change increases. 

Investment in electric car charging stations are a great way to attract more conscientious visitors, as can smaller improvements such as refillable water bottle stations.

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Naturalmat have been hand making natural and organic fibre beds and mattresses from their Devon workshop for over 20 years, supplying hotels including Six Senses, The Hoxton  and Chewton Glen, and helping them on their journey to a more sustainable approach to design. 

Are you an event venue or event manager? Join The Hostology Collective to find out how you can receive a 20% trade discount on Naturalmat products.

New Features: Host Collaboration

We are excited to be putting the final polish on our new host collaboration features. At your control, Hosts can edit their itinerary, tweaking the exact timing of key moments from the ceremony to the wedding breakfast, as well as adding notes, selecting menus and updating their food and drink numbers. Collaborating with your host has never been easier.

Below shows how a venue can ‘lock’ or ‘unlock’ an itinerary items depending on whether they want it to be editable by the host:

An ‘unlocked’ itinerary item means that the host can edit that item when they log into The Platform, this way your hosts can choose their menus, food and drink items, and even edit the location time and notes:

Hostology has had an event Notes section for a while but next week we are expanding Notes to include sharing and reordering. Share a note with your host and let their comments come through, quickly working together to finalise the finer details of the event together.

We’ve also added in ordering of notes, letting you can place the most important or time prescient ones at the top of your PDF download. Brilliant!

These helpful new features should make for a simpler, collaborative event planning experience. And there’s more coming down the track later this year. Check out The Collective for our full roadmap.

Platform Status

Updates and Releases:

We are always looking to improve Hostology and add new features to the platform. All updates are performed out of office hours to ensure to avoid any interruption of service. See below for the latest product updates and release details here.

24/11/21: Server Maintenance – there may be a period of downtime between 3am and 7am.

The Hostology Roadmap: 

Our teams are currently working hard on adding the below features.

October Webinar: Summer Season Review