Welcome to our blog!
Hi there,
Welcome to Galtres Lodge’s new Blog page! Set up for us by our lovely IT and website guru, Jonah from Simulant.
My name is Rebecca and I am one of the new(ish) owners of Galtres Lodge. I have always thought that it would be great to document the journey of a new business in the form of a Blog as I had a feeling that people might find it interesting to read about the good… and the bad! Plus, I love writing, and I thought that the exercise might be quite therapeutic!
I also have a consultancy business and did ponder the thought of writing a Blog when I first set that up, but in reality, I didn’t have that much that was interesting to say. I love doing consultancy, and love hotel marketing and revenue management (the areas that I specialise in) – but alas, I think I may be in the minority of people who can get excited about figures and the minute technicalities of selling hotel bedrooms, and so I decided against the idea!
This time around though, I think that we do have some stories that might be considered interesting, and so I have decided to make a start on this Blog. I am quite short of time, often busy, and frequently stressed, so my posts might be a bit stop-and-start, but I’ll try and add something as often as I can.
In this first post I’ll make some introductions and try to set the scene of our big plans for Galtres Lodge. I am Rebecca Hill, originally from Staffordshire, but I came to Yorkshire for University and never left. I have only ever worked in hospitality; from my teenage years when I had various part time jobs in the country pubs near my home, which then led me to study Hospitality Management at university. My four year course included a compulsory year of work experience, which I completed at Rudding Park in Harrogate. After I finished university, I returned to Rudding Park as their Marketing Assistant. From there I moved to Devonshire Hotels & Restaurants as their Marketing & Sales Manager, and was eventually promoted to Revenue Manager. I left there to become Head of Sales & Marketing at the Feversham Arms in Helmsley, and finally left there to set up Hilltop Consulting. As part of my consultancy work I provide support to a hotel management company called Premier Cru, and also hotel marketing group, Best Loved. I also support some lovely hotels directly.
If you are interested in what I do, please read my contribution to the Hotel Marketing Association’s Blog here. This is a few years old now, and I think it is quite cute that they asked me “What’s your ultimate career goal?” and I answered” I’d love my own place one day”!
My partner is called Christopher Layton, he is from Yorkshire and the reason that I never left the county after university! He got a first class honours degree in multimedia design at university, but actually decided not to pursue a career in that field. As I had secured a job at Rudding Park by this time, I was now doing a torturous two hour commute through rush-hour twice a day, and we decided that we needed to move asap. Busy with my new job, Chris was left to his own devices and found a lovely, but barely standing house for us to move into, with a view to renovating it into a liveable property. The house had a huge hole in the floor; not one part of it was straight or strong, and you had to go through one bedroom to get to the other bedrooms – it was a mess, but we loved it! Chris worked as a postman in the mornings, but was finished by early afternoon to dedicate his time to “fixing” the house. When we eventually sold this property, we had made a good amount of profit from it, and Chris had fallen in love with the idea of “saving” old properties. He continued developing houses alongside working for the Royal Mail for few years until eventually dedicating his full time to Layton Developments. Layton Developments specialised in restoring Georgian listed buildings, and Chris is passionate about doing things the “right” way to reinstate and preserve the history of these beautiful buildings.
Years passed by with us both focussing on our own careers, until one day when we saw a local hotel for sale and jokingly said that a hotel should be our next project. Another year passed and our fun idea eventually turned into a goal and here we are today; six months in to owning our own hotel business.
We both love Galtres Lodge, but we strongly feel that it is in need of some overdue TLC. Many parts of the hotel are very worn, and the business needs developing to remain sustainable for the years to come. Together, Chris and I want to improve the whole property and business with a goal to becoming a very special place to stay or dine.
Future posts will go into more detail about the work that we are doing. Feedback so far has been brilliant, and most people appreciate what we are trying to do - of course there have been some grumpy comments along the way as well! I hope that somebody enjoys reading this Blog, but if not, I enjoyed writing it!
Love from Rebecca X