Brend Hotels

Source: Retail Digital

Date :27/06/2007 12:35:04

How Brend Hotels became the largest hotel group in the UK’s South West

The Brend family can trace its roots in South West England back to the 1920s, when Percy Brend opened a butcher’s shop in Barnstaple’s Butchers’ Row. Almost half a century later, in 1969, Florence Brend formed the Brend Hotel Group with her three sons. The Brend Hotels Group is now the largest in the South West of England, overseeing eleven hotels, a touring company, beach villas and branded bars and cafés

Written by Alison Withers & Produced by James Smith

The group started with the Royal Hotel in Bideford and since then the company has expanded to eleven sites in some of Cornwall and Devon’s most beautiful locations, plus three restaurants. Six of the hotels are four star, and five are three star. The group prides itself on its dedication to personal service and treating its customers as individuals, but it is also innovative – looking at improving energy saving and recycling and with an ongoing programme of installing state of the art technology for customers in its hotels.

Continuous improvement is crucial

The group has recently relocated its head office away from its original multi-million pound headquarters and has a travel centre in Barnstaple, Devon.

Its hotels are within a heritage-rich area of the UK, with a plethora of golf courses, Exmoor, surfing beaches and ancient towns, not to mention the world-heritage Eden Project to explore, but they are not marketed solely at holiday makers, they also provide excellent venues for weddings and conferences.

Nine of the group’s hotels are in Devon and the remaining two are in Cornwall. In Devon, the group’s longest-established hotel is the Royal hotel, which dates back to the 17th Century and it was in this building that Charles Kingsley wrote much of his novel Westward Ho! The hotel is in at one end of an ancient bridge and ideal for exploring the little town of Bideford, the coast and the moors. The group has four hotels in Barnstaple; the Royal and Fortescue, the Park Hotel, the town centre Edwardian Imperial Hotel and the Barnstaple. There are two more hotels in Sidmouth, one near Braunton and one in Exeter. Hotels in Cornwall are The Carlyon Bay, St Austell, and the Royal Duchy hotel, Falmouth.

In contrast to the Royal, the Saunton Sands hotel near Braunton is a modern building perched on a cliff top overlooking the coastline. It is billed as a family hotel with an OFSTED-registered crèche and a programme of activities for children. The hotel is a mixture of family rooms, suites and self-catering villa accommodation and is close to Devon’s surfing beaches and to windswept Exmoor. With this in mind it’s marketed as an ideal location for a family and as a base for active holidays

This hotel and the Carlyon Bay in St Austell both have golf clubs right next door, but there are golf clubs within easy reach of most of the hotels, including Britain’s oldest links course at Westward Ho! And the cliff top course at Falmouth.

These are luxury hotels with all that implies so the group offers a number of extras including coach tours for guests to places of interest around the West Country. Another innovation is offering gift vouchers for a stay at a hotel or for a meal.

Complete holiday tours include picking guests up from their chosen departure point across five zones in the UK as far north as Manchester, then ferrying them to the Brend Hotel of their choice. During their stay, guests are taken on half or full day excursions to the West's most magical attractions – everything from spectacular scenery, country markets to sandy beaches and traditional West Country cream teas. At the end of the holiday the coach tours include returning guests to their home destinations. The tour itineraries include a cancellation plan for a small extra fee.

Weddings and Conferences are also a staple feature of the portfolio of services offered by the hotel group. Weddings can be as lavish or as intimate as the guests wish and the hotel group has more than 50 years’ experience in arranging them. The same meticulous attention to detail is applied to other celebration events, from Christmas parties to special nights out. For conferences the group pitches the area as “easily accessible from the M5 and well serviced by public transport” but with the added attraction of “the endless beaches and rugged landscapes of the West Country” to help delegates “feel they are a world away from the hustle and bustle of city streets.”

The group’s restaurants include the bistro-style 62 The Bank, in Barnstaple, the Sands Café on the beach near the Saunton Sands hotel, which operates as a café by day and a bistro by night, and the Carriages brasserie and bar adjacent to the Devon hotel, Exeter.

Marketing & maintaining quality standards

The company offers a range of career opportunities from playroom assistants to reception, cleaning to high quality catering.

The company has had close links with North Devon College since 2000 when the college’s workforce development team began providing training to the Devon hotels, expanded in 2003 to covering the two in Cornwall. North Devon college is a tertiary college in Barnstaple with close links to local schools and community colleges.

The college has trained approximately 400 staff in that time and, according to figures from Brend’s group training officer Andrew Mosedale, has helped to reduce staff turnover from an estimated 129 percent down to 88 percent.

Brend places considerable emphasis on recognising its staff and each year in conjunction with the college, holds “Star Student” days when students are presented with an extra certificate in recognition of their attitudes and commitment to their training.

The annual Brend Chef competition is also held at the college, where senior and junior chefs from the eleven hotels battle for the title of “Brend Chef of the Year”

Brend regularly updates its hotels in response to customers’ changing requirements and has added more rooms to at least two of its sites in the last two years. Currently the company is involved in rolling out a programme of installing WiFi hubs with BT-Invest in its units and installing flat screen TVs in rooms.

The company is aware of the importance of visibility, representation, ongoing promotion and maximising occupancy rates to its ongoing success. As such, Brend worked with technology firm Emojo to create an integrated website that serves a number of marketing functions. Before the company’s adoption of Emojo’s Affino platform, each of the company's businesses had its own website on its own URL. This meant hotel occupancy rates were not centrally coordinated - as certain hotels were fully booked whilst others had a number of spare rooms; there was little in the way of large scale brand recognition or any awareness of the company's complete offering. Now, the hotels have a year-round occupancy rate of 92 percent. The Brand awareness has grown, as well as the awareness of the individual constituents of the groups. It’s an example of the introduction of an IT initiative that has led to tangible improvements in the company’s operations. If the company continues to embrace this ethos, it’s likely that its consistent growth rates are here to stay.