Hospitality Rooms continue to be effective tools for conducting business. Learn how to set up your own hospitality area in a hotel or other location.
If you travel for business, are involved in entertaining clients or customers, or are involved in a non-profit organization, you are likely to encounter the need to create a hospitality room in which to show client appreciation or conduct business. While the hospitality room may be hosted in a hotel, your church basement or at your place of business, the basic fundamentals of effective service remain constant. Follow the suggested guidelines listed outlined below to set up your own hospitality space.
Room Set-Up
While you may be limited somewhat by the exact floor plan of your particular space, there are several key elements that are critical to integrate into the room.
Seating
- To encourage mingling, while still providing a place to rest, consider setting up several smaller seating arrangements.
- If you are hosting in a hotel’s hospitality room, chances are good that the room already contains a sofa and loveseat conversational grouping. This is great, but don’t be limited to just one chatting area.
- You can create additional conversational spaces by arranging chairs in groups of three, at various locations around the room’s perimeter.
- A banquet room setup secret is to use “cocktail rounds,” very small round tables that can hold several drinks, surrounded by two or three stackable chairs, to create conversational groups.
Service Area
- Depending on the formality of your Hospitality Room, you may be using a professional bartender, having someone from your group mix drinks and pour wine, or setting up the beverage area for self service.
- If you are using either option that does not have a professional bartender you will want to keep the beverage choices relatively simple.
- Offer both red wine and white wine. The majority of women selecting alcoholic beverages will be satisfied with wine.
- Offer three different bottled beers, including a light beer and an imported beer, which will satisfy the majority of men at the event.
- To these choices, add in a variety of mixers such as tonic, club soda, cranberry juice, bottled water, ginger ale, cola, and 7-Up.
- The hard liquor that you will need can be limited to gin, vodka, rum, scotch and whiskey.
- Add in lots of ice, lime wedges, bottle openers, stirring sticks, bar napkins and a corkscrew, and your bar is pretty much ready to go!
Snack Foods
- Your budget will determine how elaborate your food display is. Most people coming to a hospitality room will want to munch, since they are likely traveling and not on a regular food schedule. For this reason, you will want to offer bowls of non-perishable snack food, throughout the room.
- Several great options are traditional “bar snacks,” such as nuts, party mix, small crackers, popcorn, and M&Ms.
- To these basic standbys, add fun foods based upon your budget, your kitchen facility, and whether or not you’ll have serving staff to maintain the food display.
The copyright of the article How to Set Up a Hospitality Room in Entertaining is owned by Janice Benoit. Permission to republish How to Set Up a Hospitality Room in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
