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News, Information and Ideas for Managing or Booking UK Holiday Cottages

View articles for holiday cottage owners and bookers. Many of these articles are mentioned in The Holiday Homefront, a monthly newsletter for holiday cottage owners published free of charge. 

Other articles help anyone interested in planning a self-catering holiday with advice on planning and booking different types of property to information on cottages offering discounts. These are published in a Newsletter for people interested in booking holiday cottages and wanting to know more about booking procedures, discounts and holiday ideas. To receive a copy, click the Newsletter button at the bottom of the page.

Contents vary but will include the following:

  • Tips on getting it right when finding and booking a particular type of holiday cottage - such as one with 'the right kind of pool' pool, or what to expect to be included in the rental price. 
  • Inspiring articles on our 'favourite holiday cottages' for holidays on a theme or particular location, such as holiday cottages for walkers' best luxury beach holiday cottages in Cornwall.
  • When to discuss (and when not to discuss discounts) and some great deals available at the time of writing. 

  • Fancy somewhere different? Be a little spontaneous! Discover new corners of the UK when you book a weekend or midweek break in a holiday cottage somewhere at the end of the line.

    Juliet Cottage, Stratford-upon-Avon - the end of the line for Shakespeare? View cottage

    There must be hundreds of excuses to book a weekend break, from the desire to get away from it all in a rural retreat to a couple of nights being lulled asleep to the sounds of waves crashing on a nearby beach in a seaside cottage.

    But how about a voyage of discovery to a less-travelled corner of the UK?

    For travellers with a sense of adventure, here’s the perfect idea for a weekend or midweek getaway. Find and book a holiday cottage at the end of the line. Leave your car at home (or the station car park) and book tickets to a station at the end of a line. For those not sure where ‘the end of the line is’, there’s a list of thirty-one termini stations below. Each link

  • Are you buying a holiday property to rent out? 

     

    Before you start calling estate agents, here are ten questions you need to ask yourself.

    If you want advice to help you answer any of these questions, contact us (our help is freely given). Just have a pen and paper to hand! We'll do our best to help you.

     

    1. Why am I doing this?

    What's your motivation? An investment? Annual profits? Somewhere to stay yourself? The answers will help you determine what and where you should buy and the implications for property management, tax and revenue expectations.

     

    2. How will you pay for it?

    Work out what you can afford. Are you a cash buyer, or will you need a Buy to Let Mortgage? Cumberland Building Society offers useful BTL Mortgages for short-term let holiday properties.

    Can you afford the monthly repayments? All this will help you determine your budget and possible locations to search for a property. For

  • Just occasionally, it will rain on your family holiday. If you’re staying in a holiday cottage, then being house-bound is better than being room-bound in a hotel on a rainy day where the only option is to venture forth for a soaking or to find a suitable indoor attraction to entertain all ages. Fun – but your wallet will lose weight.

    For those choosing to book family-friendly holiday cottages and - owners, please take an inventory note - here is the list of the My Favourite Holiday Cottages Top Ten Board Games to play on holiday with your family.

     

    Our Rules:

    We have chosen Board Games that

    1. Can be easily set up (and put away).

    2. Don’t need lots of fiddly bits, which, if any are lost, make the game unplayable (that’s why jigsaws, even if they were a game, would not be on our list).

    3. Can be played all day or just for an hour while a shower passes by outside.

    4. Allow children to compete with adults on a

  • Advertise your holiday cottage on a quality site with a reputation for being scrupulously fair to owners and bookers alike. Established in 2010, My Favourite Holiday Cottages is increasingly popular with owners who want to pay a single subscription to advertise – and don’t want their guests to pay booking fees.

    With up to 40,000 visitors a month looking for a holiday cottage to book, My Favourite Holiday Cottages is fast becoming a go-to website. Over the past 15 months, the number of cottages advertised on the site has more than doubled from 700 to over 1500.

     

    We Drive Visitors By the Score to Your Website

    Unlike many sites, My Favourite Holiday Cottages will drive hundreds of visitors to your own website, encouraging them to enquire from there. Why? Because you will convert more enquiries from your website to bookings than from an advert. On average, a cottage advertised with us will get over 350 click-throughs to its Home or Booking pages

  • The new holiday booking season is nearly upon us, every year it goes quiet and then, on the 27th of December, the booking season takes off with a bang. The first big event on the calendar for next year is Valentines' Day which, in 2020, falls on a Friday. It may be a few weeks away, but we can already see a significant level of interest in Valentines' breaks for couples. Let’s face it; all we need is a break in the middle of winter, and tourism has changed significantly so that many properties are now open all year round.

    Enjoy Snowy Valentine Retreats at Dark Ark Cottage, Cheshire. View More Information...

    Finding the perfect holiday cottage for a couple is always a daunting task, here at My Favourite Holiday Cottages, we have a collection designed just for you with over 450 cottages across the UK that are ideal for couples. Properties range from small, cosy and quaint rural retreats, perfect for a romantic escape in the countryside, to modern

  • Guests at Eco-Chis cottages know they can reduce their environmental footprints while luxuriating in one of two beautiful Eco-Chic Cottages in Oxfordshire. And now it’s official. ‘The Chestnuts’, a 5-star-gold award Cotswold holiday cottage, has just been awarded the prestigious ‘Rose Award’ by Visit Britain,

    Hosted at Luton Hoo Hotel, the annual Visit England Rose Award provided The Chestnuts with its newest accolade: a Visit England Rose. Awarded to only 100 properties each year, this recognition from Visit England is the culmination of twelve years of work by owner Christine Burton and her team.

    View The Chestnuts in the Oxfordshire Cotswold village of Burford.

    Visit England’s team of inspectors nominates winners of this prestigious award. The Chestnuts, a four-bedroom, Five Star, Gold-rated holiday cottage in The Cotswolds, won the award for consistently over-delivering for customers: going above and beyond, and in the words of Visit

  • Many places are described as ‘unspoilt’ but rarely are. Many villages are described as ‘being in a time warp’, but the truth is usually different. BUCKS MILLS in North Devon is unspoilt, completely unspoilt.

    Leaving the main road at Bucks Cross, the lane winds down the valley, through the trees and following the path of the stream, falls towards the sea. I often wonder what visitors must think when arriving late at night; no street lights, few houses and a road resembling the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. Eventually, as you round the last corner, the valley opens out, and the village reveals itself. Tiny whitewashed cottages, nestled amongst the trees, the stream still trickling beside the lane until it arrives at the bottom of the village, where it hurls itself over the cliffs and onto the beach.

    Bucks Mills - A sleepy, secretive village lining a steep-sided woody valley leading to the sea in North Devon.

     

    A Spanish Tale

  • South West Cornwall remains a relatively unspoilt haven in the West Country, with a variety of beaches and interesting places to visit, a paradise that many tourists have never visited. The commercial centre for the area is Penzance, over 250 miles from London, and it is this geographical scale makes South West Cornwall retain the ability to offer peace and quiet in a stunning location.

    Penzance is the end of the line; well, it is for the main rail network with high-speed trains terminating at Penzance. Not quite the end of the road network, the A30 that goes by Penzance and ends at Tradescantia, but this remoteness has allowed the South West of Cornwall to retain its character, traditions and natural beauty, avoiding over-development and congestion.

    The beaches in the area are plentiful, clean with crystal clear waters, and generally relatively quiet even in the summer and winter, offering a fantastic spectacle, especially during the storms.

  • If you have visited North Devon recently, you will not have been able to miss the significant developments taking place, with substantial housing growth and tourism growth in the local area. 

    One of the significant locations for the growth in tourism in North Devon has been the traditional seaside village of Westward Ho! The town takes its name from the novel of the same name by Charles Kingsley, unique in that it takes its name from a book, although the village had started to develop ten years before the book was published but was unnamed.

    The village is set to the southern end of a long sandy beach, backed by a pebble ridge that protects the unspoilt grasslands of Northam Burrows Country Park. The village developed into a major holiday destination in Victorian times, primarily due to the fantastic location, sandy beach, good transport links and the novel's popularity. The village suffered, as did many Victorian seaside resorts in the 1970s and