EUFCN

In the fall of 2015, Production Hotel hosted a dinner for Scandinavian Locations, during their meeting in Copenhagen. Two of the guests at this dinner were on the board of the European Film Commission Network and I explained them the money saving setup that laid the basis for establishing Production Hotel 5 years earlier. The idea behind was the mass in numbers that the production crews used in hotels. Coming from a hotel sales background I knew that the more you buy the lower the price, so bulking production hotel room nights together gave lower pricing.

The EUFCN has a great number of room nights across the EU for the various productions passing through the network, and it turned out that the EUFCN had talked about a similar setup to create a joint travel purchase network for hotels, flights and car rentals. The obvious solution became that Production Hotel, building on EUFCN’s experience, founded Production Travel, a purchase network that also included flights and car rental.

When initiating the project for this travel purchase network, it was important to correctly estimate the scope of the number of bookings that could potentially pass through the network. It was also significant to clarify what kind of hotels, airlines and car rental companies that the EUFCN used. Therefore, a large survey was conducted to obtain this information based on the historic data of 2015. All the suppliers were sourced based on this survey, but it was not possible to include all of them as this would have had a devaluating effect on the number of hotel bookings, flight bookings, etc.

Another crucial point when sourcing suppliers was the sustainable profile of the companies, as this is a significant factor for EUFCN in deciding who they want to do business with. It is important that sustainability was considered when sourcing suppliers – but also that this criterion did not conflict with quality, price or location. You can read more about green filming here.

The EUFCN is a non-profit association, which supports and promotes the European film industry and culture. The main goals for EUFCN are;

·       to create a network of the most active European Film Commissions

·       to promote the exchange of information between members

·       to sustain the development of location searches and shooting opportunities

·       to carry out professional and educational activities for members.

EUFCN is also involved in promoting Film Commission activities with public institutions, the European community and the film industry as follows;

·       conducting projects funded by the European Union

·       supporting the film industry

·       organizing seminars and conferences

·       analyzing the needs of producers of films and TV dramas and meeting these needs.