Well, well what a summer! I cannot believe we are in our last few weeks and are making plans for our departure back to the UK. The resort has been so busy and the weeks have flown by. I am told this happens as I get older but I think it is because we have been so busy I have not had time to reflect until now.
The resort this year reached its highest occupancy level ever with the rooms over 90% full which is an amazing figure to reach. A lot of this is thanks to your hard work recommending our resort to other naturist friends, with bookings taken due to recommendations raising three fold on last year.
Samantha and I plan a quiet winter with some trips away for holidays. We are not running our reunion weekend this winter because we like to do it every two years. So I am sorry but you crazy party people will have to wait until January 2016!!!!
We have another exciting and full issue of our newsletter for you, so we hope you enjoy it and we look forward to catching up with you soon.
Lucy-Lou
As most of you are aware, we lost our lovely dog Sheba two years ago and decided not to have another dog. In June, this well laid plan went wrong after a visit to the Animal Rescue Centre in Kefalonia to hand in the money we had raised at the Reunion weekend…because we came away with a new member of our family.
Lucy has had to learn very quickly the rules of the resort but has settled in amazingly, plus she has proven very popular with our guests this year! She has just had all her injections and medical examinations for her to return to the UK with us in October, so she now holds a doggy passport!
Her and Archie (Simon and Sheryle’s dog) have become great friends and love nothing but a run around the garden together or a long walk along the beach in the early evening. We hope you get to meet her soon, but I think with the speed she is growing now she won’t look like this much longer.
Sailing
Our ever popular sailing trips are now online for 2015. I only plan to do one trip next year in June and this is already half full with a third cabin on hold while someone finds flights. So if you want to give this trip a go you need to move fast.
Our last trip in September was one of the best we have had. The wind was just perfect; we sailed every day at speeds of 6 to 8 knot in calm waters. We really could not have asked for better sailing conditions and all our guests on board the trip worked well together to get the very best out of our 40ft catamaran. This really was an award winning trip?!
Mon 6th Oct LATEST NEWS
Our June trip has already sold out in one day. If you are interested in one of our sailing trips please drop us an email and we will look into putting more trips on
Rooms
You will all be pleased to know, we have completed a refresh upgrade on all of our rooms this year. Samantha has done an amazing job of updating our rooms with a feature wall, new paintings, new curtains and new bedding in all the rooms plus more soft furnishings to complement the curtains. I must say I think the rooms look amazing and feedback from guests has been very positive. We were so pleased with the rooms we had to ask Arthur our photographer to make a special trip out to photograph the rooms for us so we will have them on our website very soon.
Booking System
After two years of me looking into booking systems, we have finally purchased a new online Property Management System. This software, I hope, will be easier to use than our old one and will be less labour intensive for Samantha. The best thing is, you will be able to book your next holiday online and get live room availability on your computer at home.
The new system will be embedded into our new website which we launched earlier in the year. The new site has proven to work extremely well with our hit rates doubling from 250 hits a day to 500 – 600 on average now with some days getting as high as 1,800 hits in one day.
I know many of you may not want to use this type of booking system but we feel we ought to move with the times and we hope it will make it a lot quicker and easier for you to make bookings.
We will of course still have the old way, so you can still email us or call us for availability, Samantha and I will be happy to book your holiday for you. Plus if you can’t find the availability you want online, do email us to see if there is something we can do to free a room up for you.
We hope some of you will try it and I plan to have it all online by the end of November. We are going to experience some issues I am sure, but please bear with us while we go through this change in our business.
Flights
The flight companies are now releasing the flight dates and times for summer 2015 as we speak. RyanAir have already launched all their flights and have some very good prices from Stansted. For those of you a little further north, a new route has opened with Jet2 who are now offering very cheap flights from Manchester and Leeds Bradford.
We are still waiting for Easy Jet to launch their flights but we are expecting this to happen any day now and we will try to let you know as soon as possible. It was the 4th October last year, but no sign yet, so watch this space.
We have noticed this year a rise in guests taking advantage of flying on these cheaper airlines and coming out with hand luggage only. Most of these airlines will give you 10kg of hand luggage for free but do charge crazy sums of money to put a big bag in the hold.
So why not try to pack light??!! We have washing machines now at the resort so you can wash the small amount of clothes you bring. In 2015, we are hoping to offer a Welcome Toiletry Hamper in your room for €20 (excluding suncream – to be priced individually dependent on factor) so you don’t even need to bring shampoo etc, so no issue with liquids going through security. Flying in this manner can save you over £100 each on your flight, that’s over 30 large ice cold glasses of beer next to the pool. I know what I would choose…Beer or Clothes… it’s a no brainer to me!!!