Q&A: Jack Hurley, Commercial Director, Luxury Lodges

It’s evolved over time. We’ve grown the brand by concentrating on building and operating the best self-catering resorts we can, and the guest experience follows from getting that right rather than being something you add on top or try to retrofit.

The biggest advantage of being family-run is that we can be a lot more nimble. If we see something that isn’t working or that we want to tweak, we can just change it. Or, if someone has an idea we think is worth trying, we try it. There’s not a long approval process and multiple layers of sign-off to get through. In hospitality, that matters, because most of what shapes a guest stay (good or bad!) needs dealing with this week, not at some point in the next quarter.

For us, it comes down to three things. First, the lodges themselves have to be properly made, with high-quality branded fixtures and fittings throughout. We want guests to feel like they’ve got a home-away-from-home.

Second, the location has to be worth travelling for. Beyond being located in some of the UK’s most desirable and attractive locations, each of our resorts has its own reason for being where it is.

Last but not least, the facilities have to be somewhere people want to spend time. Dylan Coastal Resort in West Wales is a great example of that. Milk Wood House, home to the resorts’ spa and dining offering, has amenities and views across the estuary that are closer to what you’d expect from a five-star hotel than from self-catering.

The lodges are the consistent thread that tie all the resorts together. They’re always built to the same specification and the same standard wherever they are, so an owner or a guest knows exactly what they’re walking into.

Everything around the lodge is deliberately different though. We don’t want Luxury Lodges to be a brand that lands somewhere and takes no notice of its surroundings. For example, Dylan Coastal Resort is coastal in its design and in how it feels, and the children’s activities there draw on the area’s connection with Dylan Thomas, including poetry and art sessions. Whereas Clowance is set on a one hundred acre woodland estate in Cornwall, so the whole resort has more of a countryside character, with the walks and the grounds doing what the estuary does at Dylan Coastal Resort.

The build quality is the same everywhere but each resort has a distinct and locally-relevant character and feel.

People want more from the area around the resort than they used to. Walking, getting out and exploring, treating where they are as part of the holiday rather than simply the place the lodge sits.

In general, guests are more active. The onsite gyms at our resorts get far more use than they used to, and a lot of people are now booking what amounts to an ‘active break’.

Expectations around communication have changed as well. Communication used to stop once a guest arrived. But now, people expect to hear from us throughout their stay, and we keep in touch with guests via SMS while they are on site. The technology available now makes that really easy and guests now see that level of communication as standard.

The other change is how late people book. Plans and bookings are made at much shorter notice than they were before, so we have to stay flexible and react quickly.

I think it’s all about the experiences at the resort and the people delivering them. Accommodation is the most straightforward thing to improve, because you can spend money and get a better lodge. What is harder, and what also makes more of a difference, is what there is to do once someone has arrived.

Partnering with local businesses is another opportunity. It means you can elevate the experience a guest gets, both on resort and in the surrounding area, without building anything yourself. It also creates another route for us as a brand, and by extension our guests, to support local businesses in a meaningful way.

The biggest one, though, is the team. People remember how they were looked after much more than they remember the specification or design. Making sure we have the right people in place, and then keeping them, makes a bigger difference to the guest journey than almost anything else you can spend money on. We have a lot of regular, repeat visitors across our resorts and having a familiar face to welcome you on arrival means a lot.

The two sides feed into each other. Owners who put their lodges into the rental programme create the lodges we let, so the holiday side of the business exists because of them. It works the other way round as well. Renting is often where the journey to ownership starts – people come and stay, fall in love with the place and then some of them go on to buy.

The expectations are genuinely different, though, and so are the people. Owners become part of the resort. Naturally, they’re more invested and take more of a long-term view, so want to be involved in where it is going. We run regular owners’ events and people have made real friendships thanks to them. Our earliest owners at Dylan Coastal Resort have watched the place change enormously over the years and are really proud to say they own there.

Understandably, a rental guest has a different relationship with the resort. They’ve only paid for one week, so if something goes wrong it matters more to them than the same problem would to an owner, because there’s not a guaranteed future visit to make it right.

It starts with the agreement. When we let a lodge on an owner’s behalf there are clear conditions attached and the main one is that the lodge has to be kept in good condition. We inspect them and go back to the owner if and when maintenance or upkeep is needed, so that anyone booking gets the same standard whichever lodge they are in.

The other part of it is the inventory. Lodges are sold fully equipped, with the same kit in every one and we hold additional supplies on site for when we need them. A guest booking at any lodge on the resort gets the same things, which takes a lot of the possible variables out before it has a chance to become a problem.

Letting is entirely the owner’s choice. But if a lodge is going into the programme it has to meet the standard, and that’s communicated and understood from the outset.

The sector has had a bit of a bumpy ride in the last few years, and it’s led to some buyers being a bit more cautious. The Charter was our way of ‘practicing what we preach’, so prospective owners could have more tangible proof of what we stand for.

The legal side is a good example. We work with a recommended panel solicitor who can advise any buyer independently on the agreements and how they work. They know us and our contracts, so they’re able to answer questions specifically and accurately, and we cover their fees on completion. The buyer then gets independent, third-party advice on exactly what they are signing, at no cost to them.

Equally, we don’t want prospective buyers just to hear it from us, so we also encourage anyone thinking of buying to speak to owners who are already here. They’ll give an honest, first-hand account of what it’s like to own at a Luxury Lodges resort. Trust in our sector has to be rebuilt and the way to do that is allowing people to check things for themselves.

Almost every owner we have uses their lodge themselves. Very few buy purely for rental income, so that shapes the conversation from the start. People buy a lodge to enjoy the resort and local area, and have flexibility over how they use it, with the rental income helping to support its running.

We’re also upfront about the numbers too. When we’re with a prospective owner, we look at the figures that we’re actually achieving on the lodges at the resort, not on forecasts or projections of what they might earn. We’re as honest and realistic as possible on what prospective buyers should expect.

The big focus for us currently is on investing in the resorts we already have. There’s still a lot of opportunity at all of them, with planning permission granted for new lodges, land allocated for future lodges and construction plans underway too. There’s scope for growth across our existing portfolio, without us having to go and find it.

For example, in the last 12 months at Whitbarrow, our Lake District resort, we’ve invested around £5 million, including enhancing our central Clubhouse’s swimming pool, gym, outdoor terrace and reception area, and we’ve also reopened the onsite restaurant, The Fellstone, with a former Masterchef contestant at the helm.

If the right opportunity came along for a new resort, we would of course look at it, but we’re not actively searching for new sites for the sake of it, when there is so much still to do where we are.

Luxury Lodges’ resorts include Bude Coastal Resort and Clowance in Cornwall, Dylan Coastal Resort in Carmarthenshire, Hexham Lodges in Northumberland and Whitbarrow in the Lake District.