Holiday Cottages Brand Guidelines: Travel Chapter’s Devon Flagship, Born of a 1989 Agency

From 100 rural properties to a national brand.

Holiday Cottages, written as its web address holidaycottages.co.uk, is a British self-catering holiday brand run by The Travel Chapter Limited, a holiday letting agency based in Bideford, North Devon. Travel Chapter calls holidaycottages.co.uk the core brand in its network and says it is “the people behind” it, with properties across the UK and Ireland that range, in its own words, from boats to barns, tents to treehouses and cottages to castles.

The company traces its roots to 1989. Travel Chapter says it evolved from a small South West letting agency run by the Morris family, with a collection of just 100 rural properties, and that the same family ethos has stayed at its core. The public register at Companies House shows the company was incorporated on 11 October 1989 and lists a series of earlier names: a shelf-company name until December 1990, then Farm & Cottage Holidays Limited from December 1990 to November 2012, Simply Cottages Limited until December 2015, and The Travel Chapter Limited since then. Its registered business is travel agency activities.

Those names chart the brand’s direction: from farm stays and cottages in the West Country to a single national name built on a descriptive web address. Travel Chapter now presents holidaycottages.co.uk as the shop window for its whole collection, while keeping a set of regional and lifestyle brands alongside it.

The company says it has more than thirty years of experience in holiday letting and describes its relationship with owners as a partnership, supported by caretakers, cleaners and maintenance teams in the areas where it works. It describes its staff as UK and Ireland-wide teams, with its head office in Bideford.

Private equity, a buyout and seven acquisitions.

Travel Chapter’s growth in the 2010s and early 2020s was backed by private equity. In January 2022 the private equity firm ECI Partners announced that it had sold the Devon-based agency to its management team, supported by investment from Intermediate Capital Group (ICG), the short-term rental trade site Shorttermrentalz reported on 10 January 2022. ECI had bought its stake four years earlier, and in that time Travel Chapter had grown organically and through seven acquisitions, the same report said.

The largest of those, according to TTG in a report by Gary Noakes on the same day, was Sally’s Cottages, bought in June 2021, with more than 500 properties in the Lake District. In December 2021 Travel Chapter also bought Dyfi Cottages, which had 50 properties around southern Snowdonia, TTG reported. Both publications put Travel Chapter’s collection at around 8,000 properties at the time.

TTG described the group as running holidaycottages.co.uk and eight other domestic brands, naming Cottages & Castles, Farm Holidays and the Wales specialist Sugar & Loaf; Shorttermrentalz also named Canine Cottages. Travel Chapter’s own brands page today divides the network into national brands, for pet-friendly cottages, lodges and log cabins, glamping and large houses sleeping eight or more, and regional brands covering Wales, Devon, Cornwall, the East Coast, Yorkshire, Norfolk, the Lake District and West Wales.

Travel Chapter’s chief executive at the time of the sale, Jayne McClure, told Travel Weekly, as quoted by Shorttermrentalz, that ECI had supported both organic and acquisitive growth and that she looked forward to working with ICG on the growth of the Travel Chapter brands.

How the category presents itself.

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 brand that wears its web address.

The brand’s name is its address, and that shapes the identity: holidaycottages.co.uk says exactly what the site sells and where to find it, and Travel Chapter uses it as the umbrella under which guests can browse the whole collection. Regional names such as Cottages & Castles and Sugar & Loaf, and lifestyle names such as Canine Cottages, sit around it to reach guests searching for a particular county or kind of holiday. Travel Chapter says it uses this portfolio of brands to appeal to all sorts of tastes and interests, on the view that guests in the UK and Ireland do not always need to travel far to get away.

Responsibility is a large part of how the company presents itself. Travel Chapter says it became a Certified B Corporation in July 2024, and that it partners with the RSPB and the Marine Conservation Society as well as smaller local initiatives. The RSPB says that since 2020 bookings with holidaycottages.co.uk have supported its woodland restoration work at sites including Franchises Lodge in the New Forest, Gwenffrwd Dinas in Wales, Wild Haweswater in the Lake District, and Corrimony and Glenborrodale in Scotland. The charity also describes a holidaycottages.co.uk Showcase Collection of ten properties hand-picked for their closeness to RSPB nature reserves, from Leighton Moss in Cumbria to Titchwell Marsh in Norfolk and Loch Leven in Scotland.

The same approach appears in the company’s wider messaging. Travel Chapter writes about celebrating the landscapes of the UK and Ireland, promoting nearby businesses, creating local jobs and encouraging guests to holiday responsibly, and it names a national charity of the year for staff fundraising. The emphasis is on places rather than on any one property: coastlines, national parks, countryside and cultural heritage close to home.

For a design guide, Holiday Cottages shows how a plain descriptive name can carry a large network, with regional and lifestyle brands doing the specialised work around it. Compare Cottages.com, another British brand named after its own web address, and Sykes Holiday Cottages. For this guide we use an estuary teal, a cob-clay orange and a sea-mist green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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