Cottages.com Brand Guidelines: Awaze’s UK Cottage Site, From Wyndham to a ChatGPT App

A UK cottage site inside a European rentals group.

Cottages.com is a holiday rental website for self-catering cottages and houses across the United Kingdom. It is one of the consumer brands of Awaze, which says on its own site that Cottages.com offers over 23,000 places to stay across the UK, “from coastal retreats to country castles.” The company that trades as Cottages.com is Awaze Vacation Rentals, whose registered office is in Lowestoft, Suffolk, according to the notice that runs along the foot of every Awaze page.

The brand’s recent history is a story of ownership rather than founding. For years Cottages.com sat inside the European vacation rental business of the American hotel and timeshare group Wyndham Worldwide. English Wikipedia, in its article on Travel + Leisure Co. (the company Wyndham Worldwide later became), says that on 9 May 2018 Wyndham completed the sale of that European rentals business to the private equity firm Platinum Equity. It lists cottages.com among the brands included, alongside Hoseasons, James Villa Holidays, Landal GreenParks and Novasol.

Less than a year later the group got a name of its own. On 5 March 2019 Awaze announced, at the ITB travel fair in Berlin, that Awaze was the new corporate name for the business behind cottages.com, Hoseasons, James Villa Holidays, Landal GreenParks and Novasol, with a new corporate team based in London. Its release noted that the brands had been owned by Wyndham Worldwide before their sale to Platinum Equity in May 2018. Skift, reporting from the same fair on 7 March 2019, wrote that brands such as Novasol, Cottages.com, James Villa Holidays and Landal GreenParks would continue to work independently under the new corporate identity, with the group sharing resources and technology behind them.

Places to stay, from towers to coastal cottages.

Cottages.com lets homes on behalf of their owners. Awaze describes its role for owners as connecting their properties with the right guests, and says that more than 90 per cent of the properties across its brands are listed exclusively with them. Some of those homes are unusual buildings. English Wikipedia’s article on the Tower of Hallbar, a sixteenth-century tower house in South Lanarkshire restored as holiday accommodation by the Vivat Trust, says the tower is now let through cottages.com.

Awaze’s brand list in 2026 places Cottages.com next to Hoseasons, NOVASOL and James Villas, with Fincallorca in Mallorca and Ardennes-étape in Belgium alongside. In September 2026 Awaze described itself as Europe’s largest holiday rentals group and the owner of cottages.com, Hoseasons, NOVASOL and James Villas; in the same results statement it said Cottages.com occupancy in the third quarter of 2026 was 64 per cent, against 60 per cent for the wider UK market, a figure that rests on the company’s own word.

The brand has also become the test bed for the group’s technology. On 24 February 2026 Awaze said it had launched an app within ChatGPT, starting with Cottages.com, one of what it called its core UK brands. Guests can describe the break they want in ordinary language, such as a dog-friendly coastal cottage with a hot tub or a countryside retreat near walking routes, and see results with live availability before completing the booking on Cottages.com itself. Awaze said the app was built on its existing data and machine-learning work and that its customer support team would remain part of the planning process. It also said, in its September 2026 statement, that it had launched new consumer apps in May 2025.

Outside the screen, the name turns up in Scottish sport. English Wikipedia says the MacTavish Cup, a knock-out shinty competition for senior teams in the north of Scotland, first played for in 1898 and usually decided at Bught Park in Inverness, is currently sponsored by cottages.com.

How holiday cottage agencies and glamping platforms present themselves.

Holiday cottage agencies sell places rather than products, and their pages are built around the property photograph. A typical listing opens on an exterior shot of a cottage, a cabin or a tent in its landscape, followed by interiors, the view from the door and, increasingly, the hot tub or the log burner. The companies publish these images themselves, usually taken for the agency or supplied by the owner, and the look of a brand is set as much by that photography as by any logo.

Naming follows the way people plan a break. Agency menus are organised by region (the Lake District, Cornwall, the Scottish Highlands, North Wales) and by collection: dog-friendly cottages, cottages with a hot tub, coastal cottages, large houses for groups, last-minute breaks. Sykes Holiday Cottages, for example, lists collections of this kind alongside its region pages, and glamping and campsite platforms apply the same logic to shepherd’s huts, yurts, treehouses and pitches.

Search is the core interface. Guests enter a place, dates and party size, then filter by features and browse results as a list or on a map. Some groups now add conversational search: in February 2026 Awaze said it had launched an app within ChatGPT that starts with Cottages.com and returns live availability from a plain-language request.

Behind the consumer brands sits a second audience: property owners. Most agencies run separate pages that invite owners to let their home through them, and corporate sites describe group structures. Several of the names in this guide belong to larger groups: Cottages.com to Awaze, and Sykes Holiday Cottages to Forge Holiday Group, the parent brand Sykes launched in 2023. This guide sets out who founded each brand, who owns it, and what it publishes, and marks what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name that is also the address.

The identity begins with the name. Cottages.com is a web address used as a brand, so the name tells a guest both what is for sale and where to find it. Awaze itself writes it two ways: in lower case as cottages.com on its brand list and in its 2019 naming release, and with a capital as Cottages.com in its 2026 releases and in the trading name of the company behind it.

The rest of the brand is carried by the homes themselves and by search. The ChatGPT app launched in 2026 turns a search into a sentence, and Awaze’s own example is telling: a coast, a dog, a hot tub. For the group, the brand sits in a family with different jobs. Hoseasons, which Awaze says has been established for more than 80 years, covers lodges, holiday parks and boats; James Villas covers Mediterranean villas; NOVASOL covers homes in 19 European countries, by Awaze’s count.

Ownership is part of the story a reader needs. Between 2018 and 2019 the brand moved from an American hotel and timeshare group to a private equity owner and then into a newly named group, while keeping its own name and website throughout, as Skift reported in 2019.

For a design guide, Cottages.com shows how a domain name can carry a whole brand when the photographs of real houses do most of the visual work. Compare it with Sykes Holiday Cottages, the Chester agency that grew from one family’s lettings, and with Vrbo, the American vacation rentals site. For this guide we use hedgerow green, pale sage and sandstone with a friendly sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cottages.com’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.