Brambles Animal Sanctuary

Brambles Animal Sanctuary is a not-for-profit animal sanctuary in neighbouring Norfolk. And we’d never heard of them until yesterday. Here’s how…

Brambles Animal Sanctuary in Downham Market, Norfolk was completely unknown to us until a twist of fate caused by the weather. Due to heavy snow this week in Buckinghamshire, some first-time guests who were really looking forward to their stay couldn’t make it out of there. All was well in Suffolk with a light dusting and clear roads.

Fortunately, they had taken out ‘Booking Protect’, which is an insurance policy we offer when booking. This covers all sorts of things including adverse weather conditions so the good news is they get their money back. As gutted as both they, and we, were, they will be re-booking soon with us.

This all happened on the Friday morning they were due to arrive. Although it was really last minute I decided to see if we could offer the weekend break at a knockdown price but give all the money to a charity. I quickly put together a newsletter to send out to what we call our ‘VIP Rewards Group’, explaining the situation. I really didn’t think we’d be able to get anyone as it was such last minute. Boy, was I wrong!

I like to think we’ve done our bit over the years for various charities, so decided to offer the incoming guests the opportunity to choose where the money went.

My phone didn’t stop ringing for hours and we had sold the break within ten minutes! Karen and Alan booked and headed down from Norfolk in the afternoon. I asked Karen where they would like the money to go and they said Brambles Animal Sanctuary in Downham Market, Norfolk. It’s a privately operated, not-for-profit animal shelter near them and they have helped out in the past. I was really over the moon at this, as everything they do relies on donations and having dug a little deeper, it looks like they do amazing work! As you can see, they really do help all creatures, great and small.

I met Karen and Alan in the afternoon and they told me all about the great work that Sue does at Brambles, so they will be taking a cheque for £200 back to her when they leave.

I’m really pleased that we could do this and make the most of a bad situation. Our original guests will be getting their money back from the insurance company, we had some new lovely guests who managed to get a bargain weekend, and most satisfying of all, a not-for-profit animal sanctuary will be getting a little extra cash this weekend. All because it snowed.

So if you live in or near Norfolk and are able to help them in any way, please get in touch with them by visiting their Facebook Page.

I’m humbled by the sheer volume of email replies I got from people saying that they couldn’t come but that it was a nice gesture. Thank you to all of you who took the time and trouble to do so. I really appreciated that. I only did it because I could.

It’s nice to be able to do things like this from time to time, so please make sure you are subscribed to our newsletter if you don’t want to miss out in the future. We use this to drop you a line every couple of weeks with news about things to do in Suffolk, as well as cancellations and exclusive offers. We didn’t put this out on social media. It went to one of our VIPs. Don’t worry about the GDPR guff, we NEVER share your info and you will only EVER hear directly from me. I worked far too hard to build our database to do stupid things with it! You can unsubscribe any time you want to miss out on all this stuff.

If you’d like to subscribe to our newsletter and get £25 off your first stay, then click here.

Oh and the real spooky thing? Karen and Alan came to stay on the same weekend as their friends, also called Karen and Alan. It was a pure coincidence and they only found out following a random text to wish one of the Alans a happy birthday!