Dogs stay FREE at Woodfarm Barns, Barges and Tuscany

We know that to Dog owners, Dogs are family members. So if you treat them the same as your human family, then so will we!

We have always levied a small charge for Dogs on their first stay, to help us cover the maintenance and cleaning costs associated with being so dog-friendly. That said, we have always invited our canine guests back free of charge.

However, we have finally decided to go with an idea we have discussed for years:

Dogs will now stay for FREE at Woodfarm Barns & Barges on all new bookings!

We don’t just tolerate dogs; we warmly welcome them!

We warmly welcome up to three Dogs at Woodfarm Barns, Barges & Tuscany. It’s our market and what we have built our reputation on since 2009. We’re also happy to discuss a fourth with you too. You’ll be asked on the booking form how many are coming, so that we know how many of our Dog Passports and yummy Dog treats are waiting for them! There’s then a £0 charge on the booking form.

Transparency

If you’re new to The Wonderful World of Woodfarm, you won’t be aware that we operate very differently from many in our industry. We believe in complete transparency, and judging by the incredible feedback we get, our guests and prospective customers appreciate it.

I’m Carl, and as the business owner, one thing I constantly do, day in, day out, is to dig as deep as I can into the far corners of my little brain to try and come up with innovative ways to get more people on this planet to come and stay at Woodfarm Barns & Barges.

Since I started Woodfarm in 2009, we’ve always followed the same simple philosophy: provide the best accommodation we can, give guests all they need for an immersive stay, and make them eager to return and recommend us.

And since 2009 my job has been to be as creative as I possibly can in encouraging increasing numbers of people to make Woodfarm their dog-friendly holiday destination of choice.

Of course, being so dog-friendly has associated maintenance and cleaning costs, so we have always levied a small charge per dog to help us cover these. However, we have always invited our canine guests back free of charge.

Barking mad?

The combined wisdom and efficacy of the entire Woodfarm marketing division (Carl & Andrew) decided to finally go with an idea we have discussed for years: don’t charge for dogs at all.

Call us barking mad, as it is a gamble. I have worked my socks off for 15 years as I type this, to build the brand and make money. If we stop charging we will make less money, it’s that simple. However…

I’m hoping that it will mean that with the high volumes of repeat business that we have earned, we are confident that once we have won new guests over, those guests will come back time and again as so many of our loyal guests do. It’s also why we launched TOGS, our Loyalty Reward Points programme earlier this year, to incentivise guests to keep coming back.

The primary role of any marketing operation is to win customers and keep them. There is so much else to running Woodfarm, in terms of maintenance, cleaning, etc., and I am fortunate to have an amazing team behind me handling all that. But my main role is to win and keep business, right?

As I type this on March 8th, a staggering 40% (almost) of our customers with bookings for 2024 are repeat guests, and 13% of our 2024 guests have multiple bookings this year!

Adding more value for money to your stay at Woodfarm.

We have never sold Woodfarm as being the cheapest, because we are not. We don’t want to be. It’s the old quality versus cheap and nasty debate. But we do know that people right now appreciate value for money more than ever.

We pride ourselves on the quality of our offering, which is clearly reflected in those repeat business stats, as well as our phenomenal Five Star reviews on our website, Tripadvisor, Google, and Facebook. But we just want to make it more cost-effective for our guests, without dropping standards.

As I say, it is a gamble, but we hope that it will contribute to us winning a wider customer base to offset the revenue we lose in charging for Dogs.

Please note that this is for all new bookings from now on. We cannot remove any dog charges retrospectively for existing bookings made before March 8th 2024. This is a decision we have taken moving forward.