Heritage Hills, a luxury, self-contained village in the state of New York, deploys browser-based scheduling solution for activity bookings across the estate
Somers, NY – April 26th, 2011: Heritage Hills of Westchester is the first commercial venue in the world to deploy Rendezvous Workspace, the powerful scheduling software from NFS Hospitality that has already been successfully implemented in law firms and corporations in the UK and US. The solution is of great benefit to these types of organisations. However, Rendezvous Workspace is equally effective in a commercial environment, as Heritage Hills recently discovered.
Located across 1,100 acres of Westchester County, Heritage Hills is a self-contained, luxury village with 9-hole and 18- hole golf courses – the centrepieces of the resort’s landscape. Over 50 groups and social clubs convene at Heritage Hills, with interests that range from gardening to sculpting. There are art studios, a library, a theatre and facilities for a range of sports, games and recreation activities.
The Pinnacle restaurant, with an outdoor terrace boasting stunning views over the golf course, offers American, bistro-style á la carte dining, a banquet facility and a classically decorated pub-style restaurant, complete with fireplace and vaulted ceiling.
Benefits of Rendezvous Workspace
Historically, all bookings at Heritage Hills were made using a bespoke, in-house system, but following some grave technical problems the venue sought a new solution. Rendezvous Workspace fitted the bill nicely, with simplicity of workflow being a big selling point. Heritage Hills is now able to schedule virtually all residents’ and guests’ activities at its various facilities in one streamlined, easy-to-use system.
Linda Montanaro, Activities Director at Heritage Hills, comments: “The main benefits of Rendezvous Workspace for my office, as it pertains to the scheduling of activities, is that it effectively coordinates the officers of the groups, clubs and activities. It also provides comprehensive set-up information for the maintenance crew.“
“I particularly like the Resources feature,” Linda adds. “In the past, we just had to put everything in a notes section and describe it; now we can streamline and clarify how many of what goes where.“
Recurring Bookings
Raj Bharambe, IT Manager at NFS, notes how the venue is highly regarded in the region, and so has a great deal of recurring bookings, such as Tai Chi classes every Monday, when two rooms are needed. “A typical booking for Heritage Hills would be for multiple sessions across different facilities in the venue,” he says. “Therefore the Recurring Booking feature within Rendezvous Workspace is ideal for Heritage Hills, as most bookings are made on a weekly basis.“
Rendezvous Workspace has very powerful recurring booking functionality and allows users to select different days of the week, exclude / include certain days, and also make exceptions. The recurring booking feature is also very easy to use, as can be seen in this screenshot.
Customised Reports
“Part of the transition period was to make everything as similar to our old way of doing things as possible,” comments Linda, “and the development of custom-generated reports was, and still is, crucial for our office.“
As Heritage Hills is such a unique venue it was important that they have their information presented in a format that matched their requirements. NFS created three modified reports, using Rendezvous Workspace’s powerful reporting engine.
Report One
Presentation of all events on notice boards around the resort, for guests’ use.
Report Two
Host Booking Sheets, comprising 52 weeks of the year and consolidating all sessions that form part of recurring bookings, in a client-specific format.
Report Three
Service department management, such as catering and housekeeping, according to Heritage Hills’ specific and unique requirements.
Natalie Appleton, Head of US Operations, comments: “The flexibility offered by Rendezvous Workspace made it an ideal solution for Heritage Hills. The wide-ranging facilities and different booking processes across the resort had to be streamlined so that staff would be able to deal with multiple aspects of the booking process easily. We were delighted to be able to help Heritage Hills in this important transition to a streamlined and easy-to-use scheduling solution.“