Smart Talking with The Hideaway Experience, Angus

In this month’s Smart Talking we are delighted to chat to Caroline Millar, Owner of the Hideaway Experience, Angus, Scotland.

Hi Caroline, welcome to Smart Talking. Please tell us about The Hideaway Experience and about your guests.

Our luxury Hideaways are romantic, luxury, country boutique style hideaways offering couples complete and total privacy. They are designed specifically for couples and offer complete privacy from other guests.

We opened in early 2011, bringing the best of local food, drink, spa and romantic experience to our guests. We have combined the best elements of self-catering with the very best elements of a luxury hotel to offer our guests. We believe in offering them as much help as they want to enjoy in-house and local experiences, either before or during their stay.

We offer a range of experiences for guests to enjoy, both in The Hideaways or in the local area. Rose petals on the bed, champagne in the fridge, preparing for a marriage proposal, booking a sports car, a hot air balloon ride, …no request is any problem for us to arrange.

What motivated you to start the business and what gives you the most satisfaction from it so far?

We were motivated to start our business as we love going to unique romantic places and after staying in many fantastic quirky places around the world we wanted to give people the opportunity to enjoy this in Scotland.

Customer feedback is clearly important to you and many of your customer reviews describe the level of service and thoughtful details you provide for each stay. How do you collect feedback from your customers and can you give us some examples of how you’ve used it to enhance or improve your business?

There are a number of ways we collect feedback from customers. First of all we actively tell customers when they arrive we are always wanting to ‘up our game’ so we ask them to think of ways to improve both facilities and our service when they are staying and ask them to let us know at anytime during their stay or when they are about to leave. We have postcards in the Hideaways asking ‘What more could we do for you?’ which people can use to jot down ideas.

We use social media to ask customers and our wider followers for ideas how to improve our facilities and the overall experience, running competitions and offering incentives to thank them for their feedback. We also send a personal email to guests after they leave to thank them for staying and to ask for a review on Trip Advisor.

An example of how we have used customer feedback to enhance our business – in November we ran a discussion on Facebook and Twitter asking for our fan’s ideas for the top facilities and top service facilities they would like to see implemented in our Hideaways. We had over 120 suggestions. We offered guests the chance to win 2 x 48 hours Luxury Lovers’ Experience at the Hideaway for the best suggestion for facilities and the best suggestion for service upgrades. We then selected the top 10 ideas for both. Facebook fans then voted on these and selected the top 3 in each category. We implemented six of the top suggestions overall.

The current economic climate is particularly challenging for businesses, not least for the Scottish tourism industry. How is your business coping with this – any positives coming out of the experience and any advice for others?

I am involved in a variety of industry groups and just back from two days with 20 other 5 star self catering businesses and the economic climate is challenging at present, for example with  more people booking last minute instead of six months ahead. However for our business we are pretty positive about 2012.

We are trying to stand out in the market place by delivering a great customer experience and we are trying to go and find our target market instead of waiting for people to find us. One example of this is the opportunities that our fantastic transport links provide our business. You can go from your desk on the top of a tower block in Canary Wharf in London via London City and Cityjet to Dundee airport, be collected by us at the airport and in our hot tub in under 3 hours.

Our new ‘Hot Desk to Hot Tub’ campaign will shortly be launched targeting the autumn short break market.  The London market is one of the places the 5 star consumers are based and we have a distinct advantage in getting them to Dundee and our business in a very short space of time. My advice to others would be ‘think outside the box.’

Do social media and digital technology have a place in your business?

Absolutely. We not only use social media and digital technology as a business tool to generate sales we use these for market research, to build customer loyalty, to have fun, to connect with other tourism businesses – it can be lonely being a rural business owner and social media is a fantastic way to share best practice with others and to feel part of a business community.

What’s The Hideaway Experience up to at the moment – any news you would like to share with us?

We are about to undertake landscaping with our access routes and invest in our Old Romantics’ Hideaway, putting in a heart shaped day bed among other new facilities.  The Old Romantics’ will be re-launched as the ‘New Romantics’ later in early summer.

We are about to launch a new range of food and drink packages for guests and we have just increased the range of spa treatments we offer which is being really well received by guests.

We are looking for other couples with great customer services skills and a tourism business or land near to a Scottish City to work with us as we franchise our Hideaway Experience business – get in touch if you are interested in becoming part of The Hideaway Experience!

Many thanks for Smart Talking with us, Caroline – we wish you all the best with your development plans!

For more information visit: www.thehideawayexperience.co.uk or follow on Twitter or Facebook.

Notes: Caroline Millar has recently graduated from the Scottish Enterprise Rural Leadership programme where she worked in a team to develop an exciting new project called Go Rural!. Go Rural is all about making it easy for people to get out of the Cities in Scotland to experience the best of rural businesses. Go Rural! will launch in early July. For more information visit www.twitter.com/goruralscotland or www.facebook.com/gorural