Episode
Marketing a Portfolio of Holiday Cottages with Clare Burgess - Suffolk Coastal Escapes
- Podcast
- Get Fully Booked
- Published
- Mar 30, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1733
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Summary
If you've ever wondered whether growing a portfolio of properties makes marketing harder, Clare from Suffolk Coastal Escapes is about to give you a very reassuring answer. This week I'm chatting with Clare, a long-standing member of my membership, The FULLY BOOOKED BUSINESS CLUB, who manages 11 holiday cottages on the Suffolk coast - an area she describes as a hidden gem that most people have never even heard of. She started with one apartment back in 2017, grew her own portfolio during Covid, and has only recently begun taking on other owners' properties. And she's done it properly... getting her own marketing house in order first before expanding. The results speak for themselves. When Clare first joined my membership, she was around 90% OTA dependent. She's now at 75% direct bookings with a 40% repeat guest rate. Those are numbers worth paying attention to. We talk about what's actually driven that shift, and it's not one big thing; it's a combination of really nailing her ideal guest (couples with dogs), obsessing over her website and SEO, and building a blog section she genuinely loves writing. She's just tipped over 100 blog posts, and every single one feeds her social media content and monthly email campaigns too. There's also a brilliant tip about how she uses a hyper-local guest guide to convert OTA bookers into lifelong direct guests, and how her blog, now called Explore the Suffolk Coast, does the same job before people have even booked. Clare also shares what it's actually like managing other people's properties alongside your own, the challenges she didn't anticipate, and why being a fellow host and a true local expert is her biggest competitive advantage over 'the big boy' agencies. A brilliant episode to close out season five. See you in a few weeks for…