When one and one makes three

When we set up Mazzard Farm holiday cottages, almost 4 years ago now, we obviously thought hard about our target audiences. The obvious one was ‘Young Families’, being parents of two young daughters ourselves. And with one half of the Mazzard Farm partnership being Dutch, targeting holiday makers in The Netherlands was an easy decision too. Having invested large sums of money and energy in ensuring our business was a highly sustainable one, we looked into, and spent advertising money accordingly, in the market for people looking for a sustainable holiday, and with Mazzard Farm surrounded by glorious countryside, walkers and cyclists got our attention too.

Four years and 672 bookings later, we have a pretty good overview of who actually comes and stays at Mazzard Farm. That we do indeed get our fair share of young families joining us for their holidays probably doesn’t come as a surprise. We have seen a fair number of walkers, cyclists and runners too, and that the ‘sustainable tourism’ market seems to be a hard one to crack (assuming it actually exists) is something we already elaborated on in an earlier blog.

Yet, we discovered that Mazzard Farm is also very popular with a group we never targeted, a group in fact we never realised was that substantial: families with Twins! It was during last year’s summer, we were preparing for our regular Friday arrival of new guests, when one of our cleaners came to see me and told me we were one cot and a high chair short. Given we already owned 7 of each, and that we only have 6 cottages, I couldn’t quite believe this. “We have two families staying with twins” the cleaner mentioned, "So they take up four cots etc. between them alone." “Two families with twins?” I replied “What a coincidence is that?”

And it was at that stage that it dawned on me that as of late, we seem to have had rather a lot of twins on site. One hour and a bit of analysis of both our database and wikipedia later, and I had the ‘facts’: 7% of previous 12 months' families staying at Mazzard Farm came with twins, whereas in the UK on average, only 1.5% of pregnancies lead to the birth of twins. Knowing a little bit about statistics, I could conclude that this is a significant over-representation!

But why? I hear you ask. Well we asked ourselves that question too, but decided that it was probably best to ask the parents concerned. And their responses were pretty unanimous: they all, so it seemed, had read one or more Mazzard Farm reviews left by parents with twins, and, to quote just one parent we spoke with: “If you think that traveling with one baby is a challenge, just think of what hurdles we face! So if you read that someone in the same position as you has had a great time, then we immediately take notice. The fact that Mazzard Farm provides all the clobber we would otherwise have to bring along – times two! – and for free as well, makes a lot of difference to any parent with young children, and a lot more to those who have two of the same age! That probably explains why you see rather a lot of us, parents with twins.”

So there: for all the targeting and marketing in the world, sometimes you become a firm favourite with a segment of the population you hardly realise existed, and without – seemingly – doing anything different to reach them. Needless to say, we really don’t mind. The more (twins), the merrier! And oh yes, that same day I bought an extra cot and high chair (and a changing mat and a potty, just in case!).

Ruud Jansen Venneboer

Mazzard Farm holiday cottages

Jurassic Coast, East Devon

www.mazzardfarm.com

Green Tourism – fact or fiction?

It is undeniable that more and more tourism businesses have started thinking ‘green’. And quite successfully too, even if some may not be getting much beyond a few slaps of ‘greenwash’. This can only be a good thing, as the tourism industry can make a huge difference to the world we live in when it comes to helping save the planet. Whether through significant reductions in energy consumption, reducing / reusing / recycling, emphasis on sustainable forms of travel, or indeed a focus on local suppliers and the local community – or ideally all of these – tourism businesses small or large can each do their thing. No, should do their thing.

When we set up Mazzard Farm some 4 years back, there was no question as to whether we’d go the green route. The question was how far we could realistically push it, given our relatively small size and associated budgets. What we found was that we could actually achieve a lot, with most steps taken not costing us a penny. Having won a small cabinet full of green tourism related awards in the meantime, a comment many people make goes along the lines of “your green ethos must have really helped you fill up so quickly”. My initial response to this was “Well, it is early days, but I am sure it helps”. A year ago that would have changed into “Not sure, but it won’t have done us any harm”. Now, just over 3 years since opening, I am not even sure whether the latter luke-warm response is actually true.

And this explains the headline: is green tourism fact or fiction? Is there actually a true market for green travel? Or is it all talk and no action? Judging by the number of articles written about, and presumably for, the green tourist, and the number of web portals and magazines dedicated to them, you would think that this market must be fairly sizeable. Indeed, that there are plenty of people out there for whom the ‘greenness’ of their holiday destination in one of the main factors, or the main factor even, when picking their holiday. Sadly, I am getting more and more signals that this group is actually rather small, and that as a product, green tourism is a minute niche product at best.  And I am concluding that even for a multiple green award winning holiday business like ours, dedicated green visitors are not going to keep our bread buttered. In fact, it probably wouldn’t even allow us to buy the bread!

Allow me to provide some evidence: we spend some 30% of our marketing budget on listings with green portals and adds in green magazines. Yet, less than 2% our web traffic originates from these! Worse, since opening, just one (from well over 600) booking can be attributed directly to people having used one of these green portals or read some green magazine! To put this in some perspective, almost 6% of Mazzard Farm bookings are from families with twins, who are a demographic group as small as 1.5% of the UK population – yet, we don’t target this group at all, leave alone spend any of our marketing budget on them. Yet, contrary to Green Travellers, when did you last hear anyone referring to ‘families with twins’ as a significant special interest group?

To further substantiate my concerns whether these committed green travellers can actually fill a room when together, I decided to do a little experiment earlier this month. We put together a highly attractive ‘green offer’, and ran an active twitter and facebook campaign pushing the offer. From looking at the retweets, the offer has by now been under the eyes of some 15,000+ people on twitter alone. We have yet to receive the first enquiry. This experiment mirrors our attempts last year to push various green breaks, launched during the reasonably high profile Green Tourism Week. Again, we saw not one single uptake. Or enquiry even for that matter.

Don’t get me wrong, we didn’t go green as some sort of marketing ploy, and we would have made exactly the same decisions regarding green investments today as we did 4 years back, but just because we believe in being a ‘good’ business. Nor would I suggest that for some of our guests it hasn’t been a factor in deciding to join us. What we are seriously questioning though is whether the time and money spent on focussing on a potential group of dedicated environmentally conscious guests is the best way forward. I’m afraid that at present I can only conclude that it isn’t. Then again, we may have just been looking in the wrong places…

Ruud Jansen Venneboer

Owner Mazzard Farm holiday cottages, East Devon, UK

Winner of 2010 Devon Tourism Excellence Awards for Sustainable Tourism and Winner of Winners

www.mazzardfarm.com