Bringing the Pacific Islands to Los Angeles: How Belles Beach House Uses Tripleseat to Manage Private Events
When you can’t catch a flight to the Pacific Islands, you visit Belles Beach House to experience a vacation of your own with a tiki-themed ambiance, refreshing frozen cocktails, and an innovative Hawaiian-inspired menu.
Belles Beach House is always ready to give a vacation-like experience to groups of guests in the form of private events, hosting an average of 25 to 30 private events per month. According to the Director of Events at Belles Beach House, Tripleseat is the platform that fully encompasses everything an event director would need to execute beautiful events, and it does just that for events at Belles Beach House.
About the Company
Wish You Were Here Group’s restaurant Belles Beach House is located in the heart of Venice Beach, Calif., and is here to transport guests from the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles to the Pacific Islands. The tiki-themed restaurant is always lively — filled with friends who stopped in for a group dinner, a couple meeting for a first date, or a large group gathering together for a private party. The atmosphere, food, and drink at Belles Beach House always give guests a reason to return again and again. The crispy rock shrimp really is that good! Belles Beach House is also the sister restaurant of the Santa Monica hotspot, Elephante.
Belles Beach House is unique in that it is a “show-ready” space, so the Hawaiian ambiance is always set and ready for guests to experience. Regarding private events, Belles Beach House facilities everything from birthday parties to corporate happy hours to engagement parties. Any occasion can use a tiki theme, and Belles has multiple spaces for celebrating. When it comes to the event spaces, the Oli Kai Room, Larry’s Dining Room, and Windward Deck are the three main spaces that can hold anywhere from 12 guests to 350 guests. The spaces can be booked individually or together to accommodate various event needs.
We spoke with Courtney Lawrence, Director of Events at Belles Beach House, about how she uses Tripleseat to manage and execute an average of 25 to 30 private events per month at the venue.
How Tripleseat helps
When Lawrence joined the Belles Beach House team, she inherited the Tripleseat platform to manage private events, just like at their sister location. As an events team of one, it is important for Lawrence to be aware of every detail when dealing with multiple clients and events at one time.
As Lawrence prepares for any event, she works with her front-of-house and back-of-house teams at Belles to share all event logistics. This is where Tripleseat comes into play from a bird’s eye view. Tripleseat is the main platform for all internal event communication and the way to share BEOs with chefs, party details with servers, and overall event information with upper management — all under one platform. Tripleseat’s cloud-based capabilities allow any staff member to check in to their responsibilities anytime, given their allowed Tripleseat user settings. If a change occurs, it can be reflected within Tripleseat for all team members to access.
To take a step back, Tripleseat helps Lawrence long before an event occurs. Lawrence describes her favorite feature as being the “leads tab.” The leads tab is home to any new lead that comes into Belles once submitted through a Tripleseat lead form. When guests visit the Belles Beach House website, they can easily find the private events page where they can submit an event inquiry to the Tripleseat lead form that populates into Tripleseat. Events at Belles Beach House often get booked one month out, so Lawrence frequently checks the leads tab to monitor all the new leads that come in and immediately give them attention. Within the Tripleseat leads tab, Lawrence can convert the lead into the next stage of the planning process to ultimately create a booked event. The leads tab makes it easy to see all leads in one place and makes it possible to go back to conversations where potential clients still need to respond.
Once an event is on the calendar, Lawrence goes into planning mode to work on all the details the client requests. Tripleseat’s ability to customize documents is handy here, as Lawrence can work with BEOs built specifically for the Belles team. Chefs may prefer to see the food written out in a certain way, and Lawrence can make those customizations within the BEOs for her team. Tripleseat’s ability to customize is also helpful for other documents like event contracts, and Lawrence can include any information or contract details that should apply specifically to Belles.
Tripleseat is just as helpful for day-to-day operations as it is to get a holistic view of upcoming events. The Tripleseat calendar view gives a quick snapshot of all the events on any given month. The calendar can be viewed by month, week, or day to show events in a given period. The Tripleseat calendar also color codes events to show what stage of the planning process the event is in, which easily shows the viewer the booked vs. tentative events. Lawrence uses the calendar to quickly understand what days, spaces, and times are still available for events. She often references the Tripleseat calendar when speaking with upper management about upcoming events.
By using Tripleseat as an event management platform, Lawrence can feel confident that she has all her event details in one place, allowing her to efficiently focus on more events at once as her events program continues to grow.
Belles in the community
Being a beautiful venue in the Venice Beach neighborhood, Belles uses its space to support charitable initiatives within the Los Angeles community through hosting events. Belles partners with organizations like Westminster Elementary and Pups Without Borders to host events that drive awareness to these organizations. For Westminster Elementary, the venue recently hosted a teacher’s night out for about 70 teachers to enjoy an evening away at Belles Beach House. For Pups Without Borders, Belles offers their space as a place for pups to be adopted on the spot during the nonprofit’s events. Belles worked with liquor brands to offer free pina coladas to those who adopted a puppy or to give proceeds from drinks to the organization.
Future plans
Since its opening one and half years ago, Belles Beach House has seen great success and only anticipates that to continue in 2023. Belles Beach House is here to transport you and your guests to wherever feels like a vacation to you!
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