Born from passion, built for success

There’s a moment most hospitality professionals know well. You’ve just confirmed a booking for forty guests. The deposit is paid. The customer is excited. And then you open a new spreadsheet.

You type in the header row. You format the columns: starter, main, dessert, dietary requirements, allergies. You attach it to an email, write a polite covering note asking the host to share it with their group, and hit send. Then you wait. Maybe chase it up, and then reformat whatever comes back.

For Andrew Norton, that moment repeated itself hundreds of times across fifteen years of running his own hospitality venue. It was not a catastrophic problem. The events ran, the guests were fed. But underneath every successful event was a mountain of manual admin, and a growing sense that it was becoming more and more unnecessary.

“I just realised there must be a better way of doing it.”

The specific frustration was not the spreadsheet itself. Spreadsheets work for financial forecasting, expense tracking, and data that does not move. The problem is that venues use them for something they were never designed for: collecting dynamic, personalised, time-sensitive information from large numbers of individual guests. And then passing that job to the customer.

Think about what that actually means. A paying customer, someone who has chosen your venue, confirmed their booking, and is genuinely looking forward to the event, receives an email with a spreadsheet attached. They are asked to forward it to their guests, chase them for their choices, compile the responses, and send it back. They are, in effect, doing your admin for you, all the while trying to organise their event.

“We shouldn’t be asking our customers to do these jobs for us.”

There is no failure of technology to meet this demand. The hospitality industry is simply stuck in the age-old mindset of “this is how it’s always been done.” Venues have operated this way for decades, and in hospitality, an industry built on solving problems in the moment, that tends to mean it keeps happening. A spreadsheet gets lost in an email chain. Someone chases it. It comes back incomplete. The chef gets a version that is already out of date. A guest’s allergy is noted somewhere, but never makes it to the kitchen report. And nobody fixes the process, because service starts in two hours.

Creventa exists to fix the process. The platform automates the entire information-gathering workflow between a venue and its guests: menus, dietary requirements, allergens, seating, payments, drinks pre-orders, in a fully branded, personalised format that requires no spreadsheets, no chasing, and no manual reformatting. A venue creates an event in minutes, sends a single action, and Creventa handles everything else.

For guests, it is frictionless. There is no account to create, no password to remember, no form to download. They receive a personalised invitation, click a link, make their choices, and forget about it until the night. For guests with allergies or specific dietary needs, people who often approach large catering events with more anxiety than others, it is genuinely reassuring. Their requirements are captured individually, confirmed back to them, and tracked all the way through to their place card.

“With Creventa, you know exactly who’s coming, where they’re sitting, what their allergies are, and you can address it way before they walk through the door.”

The team designed and built the system to be invisible. Creventa never puts its own brand in front of a venue’s customers. From the guest’s perspective, everything feels like a natural extension of the venue itself.

The platform works alongside existing systems such as Delphi, Opera, SevenRooms and Guestline. These tools manage bookings and availability. Creventa focuses on the detailed process of gathering guest information.

The need for a system like this has existed for a long time. It is something the industry has managed around rather than solved. What was missing was a tool built specifically for this part of the process, by someone who had experienced it first-hand.

That is why Creventa exists. It improves a part of the workflow that has long been inefficient, for both venues and their customers