How Hostology gave Iscoyd Park one planning process that anyone can pick up

A country house venue with in-house catering and thirty bedrooms on site, where every event now follows the same workflow, whether it is being run by the owner, an event manager in their first year, or the host themselves.

The challenge

Iscoyd Park is a country house venue in Shropshire, close to the North Wales border. It hosts events for up to 160 guests, caters in-house and has thirty bedrooms on site, so a single event carries a great many moving parts and a great many people who need the same information.

The way those events were planned, as owner Phil Godsal puts it, was “time consuming and inconsistent”.

Every event was planned a little differently. How smoothly the planning went depended on who was handling it, and what they happened to remember to ask. The detail that mattered lived in people rather than in a system.

That has a cost in three directions at once. The kitchen had to chase the information it needed. Hosts had to wait to be told what came next. And anyone new joining the team had to absorb a process that had never been written down.

It is the kind of problem that does not announce itself. Nothing goes visibly wrong. It simply takes longer than it should, every single time, and it gets harder to hand on as the venue gets busier.

The solution

Iscoyd Park moved its planning into Hostology and built the process around workflows and tasks.

The venue wrote its planning process down once, in order, and now applies it to every event. The team can see what has been done and what comes next. So can the host.

“Hostology eliminates the uncertainty of what the next step is for couples, as they can get stuck in straight away and follow our workflows.”

Iscoyd Park

That single change moves the effort. Instead of the venue prompting each host through each stage, hosts open the plan and work through it themselves.

The same applies inside the venue. Because the process sits in the platform rather than in someone’s head, it is the same process whoever is running the event.

It also covers the whole of an event, including the parts that usually sit outside the plan. The venue’s thirty bedrooms are booked and managed in Hostology against the event they belong to, so guest rooms are part of the same record rather than a separate list to keep in line. Payments run through Stripe and connect to Xero, so the financial side of an event follows the same process as everything else.

The team singles out workflows and tasks as its favourite part of Hostology, because it holds the whole planning process, for the venue and for the host, in one place.

The result

Iscoyd Park now has a planning process that does not depend on who is running it.

The clearest test of that is what happens when somebody new arrives. Two event managers, both early in their careers, learned Hostology and were running full events through it straight away, with every detail going through the platform. There was no long shadowing period and nothing to pick up informally, because the process was already there to follow.

The kitchen feels the same consistency. Because catering is in-house, the chef depends on event detail arriving in a reliable form rather than being chased for it. The head chef at the time described Hostology as “the best system I’ve used so far”, giving the right information at the point it was needed.

Hosts get the same thing from the other side: a plan they can work through at their own pace, with a next step always visible, and their guests’ rooms held against the same event.

And it holds at volume. Iscoyd Park runs around 130 events a year, up from 80 in the year it joined Hostology, and each one follows the same workflow. Fifty more events, all planned the same way, all handled by the team the venue already had. The number of events has grown. The team running them has not had to.