Ingrid Flute Holiday Cottages – Strategy & Team Development

Ingrid Flute Holiday Cottages had a long history of providing excellent holiday property accommodation, supported by a passionate and knowledgeable team.

However, the advent of online booking platforms and changing buying patterns was having an impact.

What did the Ingrid Flute value proposition need to be? How would they be able to communicate this, and what role could their current team play in delivering this?

Part of the Original Cottage Company, the UK’s largest independent cottage group, we were delighted to win the five way pitch and secure this project.

This project excited us for several reasons. Firstly it wasn’t straight forward. I’m sure we’re all familiar with holiday cottages. Owning and renting them in the UK (and the rest of the world) is a huge business, which shows no real signs of slowing.

However, like any market… there’s change afoot. A new generation of customers don’t visit offices to book their holiday. What’s more they want shorter holidays, to book last minute, and what they expect from a cottage have changed substantially.

Throw in many new ways of booking, from AirBnB to Booking.com, all providing lots of client data for ever hungry property owners, and you’ve got to question the existence of many holiday rental companies.

What’s more, all of these changes had created quite a bit of controversy for Ingrid Flute employees. Was the business about good local knowledge and the ability to drop in, supported by a brochure, or a call-centre and email marketing plus new website?

Whilst our brief was to reimagine what Ingrid Flute meant to current and future customers, and communicate this in both print and digital media, we had to bring the Ingrid Flute team along with us. After all, this was their brand. They had lots of insight, and a passion for success, and Biskit won’t work with companies that don’t value their staff.

But first, we had a job to do. How to get all the staff onside, and thinking creatively about what the Ingrid Flute brand meant to them, their customers (which also included the property owners), and what their ‘edge’ was versus the competition.

We also needed to highlight the changing role of ‘customer journey’ and how todays holiday maker demanded more than perhaps Ingrid Flute had previously provided.

We decided to take these first few sessions off-site, using a local hotel venue. Working with the hotel team, we arranged for our conference room to receive a 2 star treatment. Dirty coffee cups, missing biscuits, locked doors etc… all led to a poor customer journey and experience.

With a rapid turnaround after lunch, we managed to engage the team on the experience which their customers received, and an honest discussion about what the Ingrid Flute difference was, and could be in the future.

This was only the first of many sessions that saw us meeting with the Ingrid Flute team, generating ideas and mapping these onto timelines, leading to a real sense of satisfaction amongst everyone involved.

At the end of the project, not only did we have a clear consensus on what the Ingrid Flute brand stood for, but a really clear sense of how the new marketing comms channels needed to look: from a refreshed brochure, through to comms templates for social media, email marketing (with resulting ROI measures), and a training development plan for the in-house marketer, which saw her achieve CIM qualified status.

Even more exciting for Biskit, was the opportunity to revisit Ingrid Flute every year, just to ensure that the team remained on track, and kept ahead of new ideas within their market. These team days were huge fun, and saw us visit their properties in the Yorkshire Dales, through to team building near Whitby, that saw a whole new raft of ideas and engagement from an ever expanding team.