Chestnut Meadow Country Park: turning pricing into a competitive advantage with Cloudbeds RMS

Location: England

See how Cloudbeds is helping Chestnut Meadow Country Park turn pricing into a competitive advantage with Cloudbeds RMS

"We were never very proactive in managing our pricing. But now Cloudbeds RMS is making us really think about the different levers we can pull."
— Simon Blades, Chestnut Meadow Country Park

Key insights

Smarter pricing, backed by data
Revenue optimization without sacrificing the guest experience
Forecasts have proven accurate to within approximately 5%, helping anticipate demand, refine pricing strategy, and move beyond reactive revenue management.

The story

Nestled in the East Sussex countryside, Chestnut Meadow Country Park offers a collection of spacious holiday lodges designed for family getaways and short leisure breaks. Unlike hotels serving a constant flow of one-night business travelers, Chestnut Meadow’s guests often spend days comparing destinations before committing to a booking, making pricing decisions both more nuanced and more consequential.

When Simon Blades joined the family business, hospitality was a completely new industry.

“My background’s banking,” Simon explains. “I started working with my sister and brother-in-law nearly a year ago, just to try and turn their businesses around from loss-making to profit.”

That turnaround has already begun. “We are now in profit,” Simon says.

But achieving sustainable growth required more than cutting costs. It meant replacing instinctive, static pricing with a smarter, more responsive revenue strategy.

Moving beyond static seasonal pricing

For years, pricing followed a familiar pattern.

The business established annual base rates, added modest increases during school holidays, summer, and Christmas, and largely left prices untouched throughout the year. Early attempts at automated pricing relied on simple occupancy rules but received little ongoing attention.

Simon wanted something more sophisticated, but not something that removed human judgement.

Rather than changing prices every day, he reviews Cloudbeds RMS almost daily but generally implements pricing changes weekly, and sometimes every fortnight.

The decision isn’t about saving time. It’s about protecting the guest experience.

“Our customers tend to come for relatively short breaks,” Simon explains. “They’re looking at a number of properties before making a decision. If the price is changing every day, I don’t think that looks great.”

Instead, Cloudbeds RMS gives him the information needed to make informed commercial decisions while allowing him to decide when and how often to act.

Confidence through explanation, not automation

For Simon, the value of Cloudbeds RMS isn’t simply the recommendations, it’s understanding why those recommendations are being made.

Rather than functioning as a black box, the platform combines occupancy, booking pace, competitor pricing, and market demand into recommendations that Simon can review before deciding whether to accept them.

“The information it provides is useful,” he says. “It tells you the reasoning for lowering prices or increasing prices.”

That transparency is especially important because Chestnut Meadow doesn’t operate like a traditional hotel.

With just 21 lodges, each pricing decision has a meaningful impact, and Simon wants to ensure every recommendation aligns with both commercial goals and guest expectations.

He regularly validates competitor pricing, reviews local market conditions, and uses Cloudbeds RMS as a decision-support tool rather than simply accepting recommendations automatically.

Balancing revenue with the guest experience

Unlike many revenue managers whose primary objective is maximizing average daily rate, Simon views occupancy as equally important.

“I prefer to be full,” he says. “Even if it’s at a slightly lower daily rate.”

Higher occupancy creates benefits that extend well beyond room revenue.

“When we’re busy, we’re more efficient operationally,” Simon explains. “From a staffing perspective, I don’t have people going slowly. I pay them the same and they just work quicker. It sounds hard, but it’s true.”

That operational reality shapes every pricing decision.

Cloudbeds RMS helps Simon identify opportunities to stimulate demand during quieter periods while giving him the confidence to protect rate during stronger demand windows.

Forecasts that earn trust

Like many independent operators, Simon approached revenue forecasting with healthy skepticism.

“I was keeping notes,” he explains. “When we got to the beginning of May, I’d look back and ask whether the forecast was actually suggesting what happened.”

Over time, Cloudbeds RMS proved remarkably accurate.

“Accepting almost all of the recommendations, I was getting within sort of 5% of what it was suggesting back two months ago.”

For Simon, that accuracy has fundamentally changed the way he approaches pricing.

“It’s a crystal ball, isn’t it, looking into the future?” he says. “But actually, it’s quite nice to see that it was doing what it was saying could happen.”

Instead of reacting to bookings after they arrive, the team can make pricing decisions with greater confidence, knowing the recommendations are grounded in data rather than intuition.

Original story on cloudbeds.com: https://www.cloudbeds.com/customers/chestnut-meadow/