Forty Shades of Green - Sustainable Holidays at Mazzard Farm holiday cottages

Take a holiday anywhere and you will most likely see claims that your accommodation ‘strongly cares about the environment’. Examples of what it does will range from a ‘towel policy’, ‘we recycle’ statement, low energy lighting and / or activity responsive controls, to local sourcing arrangements. All good of course, irrespective of whether these steps were actually taken with sustainability in mind, or ‘just’ plain old cost saving measures.

Increasingly however, operators in the tourism industry go well and truly beyond the ‘please hang up your towel if it doesn’t need washing’ statement, and here at Mazzard Farm cottages on East Hill (Ottery St. Mary, Devon), we believe we do as much as we possibly can to keep up with these developments. And dare we say so, we may have even developed one or two initiatives ourselves!

In broad terms, we distinguish between two major elements: the actions we have taken ourselves / behaviours we show, and guest behaviours we hope to influence, trying to make sure our guests have a great holiday, and one which is as sustainable as possible.

Looking at the former, besides all the obvious ones (i.e. materials used when converting our barns into cottages, energy and lighting, green cleaning solutions, appliances, recycling, biomass boiler, solar PV panels), we provide discounts to guests arriving by public transport and encourage guests to enjoy local wildlife (we are in an AONB). Furthermore, we are very active locally (schools, business forums, green networks), and we regularly offer Mazzard Farm as an ‘educational playground’ for local groups such as the school, nursery and Brownie packs.

It is in regards to influencing our guests’ behaviours where we believe we have discovered new and innovative approaches. Innovations which are easily transferable to other tourism businesses. For example, ahead of guests arriving at Mazzard Farm we e-mail them two documents: a comprehensive Guide to ‘what to do in the area’ and a ‘Shopping Locally in Ottery St. Mary’ 2-pager. Both have a number of objectives: ensuring our guests have the best possible time at Mazzard Farm of course, but other aims include supporting the local economy, keeping food-miles down and reducing the use of a car during people’s stay. We estimate that the East Devon Guide alone reduces guests’ car use by as much as 75%, and since we launched the local shopping 2-pager, supermarket deliveries have virtually ceased.

We very much believe in the carrot rather than the stick, and that is why our approach works. And what is more, we know that some aspects of the ‘Mazzard Farm experience’ can lead to changing behaviours at home too!

www.mazzardfarm.com / 01404 815492

Who would argue with Stephen Fry?

Not many, I hear you say? Well until this week that was, when Fry was presented as one of the figure heads of a brand new Enjoy England Campaign aimed to try and persuade the English to holiday at home in 2012. ‘Make it a Great 2012’ the 90 second commercial tells us, and in it, Fry, Julie Walters, Rupert Grint and Michelle Dochery (of Downton Abbey fame) try and convince the millions of English presently considering a holiday abroad that there is really no need to get a passport, currency, jabs and flight tickets, and to holiday in England instead.

As could be expected, the campaign has come in for quite a bit of stick, with Telegraph Travel writer Nigel Richardson being particularly outspoken. So much so in fact, that the clip – so he claims – has helped him decide to holiday in Greece instead! No doubt hugely appreciated by cash-strapped Greece, but not quite what the people at Visit England had in mind I suspect…

And of course, if you are so inclined, the campaign isn’t hard to knock. Is any campaign? £4 million spent on what we already knew? No rain drop in sight? Over-romanticising of ‘chocolate box England’ again? And of course the ultimate question: “So where do the actors holiday themselves?”. Arguments galore!

What should probably be pointed out is that most people in UK tourism, myself included, didn’t want this campaign. We didn’t want any campaign. In a rare moment of industry unity, we asked for just one thing: a fair trading climate, meaning that tourism and leisure related VAT would be reduced to 5%, bringing us in line with most other countries in Europe. This would allow for significant investments to be made, and help the industry deal with one of the common (mis?)perceptions that tourism in the UK is overpriced. Or in other words: help us compete on a level playing field.

The trading climate is tough for many in our industry, and most of us always knew that the Olympics were an unlikely force to boost UK tourism. Big events never do. If anything, they scare off potential tourists, added to which the timing of the Games coincides with what is already by far the busiest holiday season of the year: the summer school holidays. In all reality, if you don’t already do well during these weeks, you’re probably in the wrong job. 

So given that a reduction in VAT in the current economical climate is as likely as Lady Gaga being asked to Chair the WI, we ought to be happy with any shot in the arm we can get. Remember that for decades now, UK Politicians have demonstrated a colossal lack of understanding, or indeed interest, in domestic tourism, even though this represents some 9% of GDP. So for them to be willing to invest at least some money back into our industry is surely a good thing. Yes they got the sentiment wrong when they thought they could impose a 20.12% discount on the industry (hugely missing the rather obvious point that 20.12% is virtually the same percentage as the VAT it makes us charge our guests!), but we managed to largely nip that in the bud, forcing Visit England to change it into a 20.12 Offer site instead. It is now up to everyone working in the industry to prove that Stephen Fry was right after all: Why would you want to be anywhere else than in England?

Ruud Jansen Venneboer

Mazzard Farm holiday cottages

East Devon

www.mazzardfarm.com 

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