Sykes Holiday Cottages Brand Guidelines: A 1991 Yorkshire Agency, Chester & Forge

A family letting business with hand-drawn cottages.

Sykes Holiday Cottages began with one house. Cheshire Life, in a profile of the company published in August 2024, says the business started as a single property in Yorkshire owned by a Mrs Sykes, who in the 1970s began letting her second home for a small income. A friend asked her to manage the letting of her own cottage, then another friend did the same, and in 1991 Barbara Sykes and her son Clive founded Sykes Holiday Cottages, growing it to more than 1,000 holiday homes, the magazine says.

The company tells the same story with more detail on its own blog. It says Clive Sykes and his mother first ran a small agency called Cottage Holidays, letting their own cottages and those of friends in and around the Yorkshire Dales. Clive, the company says, drew line drawings of every property himself, together with the illustrations for the firm’s first brochure, which came out in 1992. The business then took the name Sykes Cottages and, by 1994, had added cottages in the Peak District, Northumberland and southern Scotland, according to the same account.

In the late 1990s the business moved to Chester, where it set up offices in the city, Cheshire Life reports. Chester has remained its home: the company now occupies offices close to the railway station, and describes itself as based in the city.

Private equity, acquisitions and a parent brand.

The family firm became a private-equity-backed group in the 2010s. When Livingbridge invested in January 2015, Sykes managed about 5,000 properties in the UK and Ireland, Travel Weekly and Travolution reported in 2019. On 28 October 2019 both titles reported that Vitruvian Partners had taken a majority stake in the company, replacing Livingbridge after a five-year partnership. Travolution added that, by then, the firm said it had completed 12 acquisitions, and that in April 2019 it had taken its first step abroad by buying a majority stake in Bachcare, a holiday rental company in New Zealand.

The acquisitions continued. On 7 April 2022 TheBusinessDesk reported that Sykes had completed a deal to acquire Forest Holidays, the Derbyshire-based operator of cabins set in Britain’s forests across 12 locations. Cheshire Life describes Forest Holidays as offering cabins in Forestry Commission woodland, including Delamere in Cheshire.

In May 2023 Sykes launched Forge Holiday Group as a new parent brand, ShortTermRentalz reported on 2 May 2023. The group brought together four divisions: the Sykes Holiday Cottages agency, Forest Holidays, the static-caravan letting site UKcaravans4hire and Bachcare in New Zealand, responsible between them for more than 31,000 units of accommodation, with the Sykes agency itself offering more than 22,000 UK holiday homes. Cheshire Life added in 2024 that many of the regional agencies Sykes bought keep their own local names, giving Menai Holidays in North Wales as an example.

The scale is given in the company’s own figures. Its chief executive told the magazine that Sykes had reached 20,000 properties and 700 employees by 2019, and that by 2024 guests could choose from more than 30,000 properties across the UK and New Zealand, where holiday homes are known as baches or cribs, with more than 1,900 people working for the group. UK Caravans for Hire, the static-caravan arm, listed more than 7,000 caravans, he said.

The company has also presented itself through its purpose. It says it adopted a profit-with-purpose strategy in 2021, and its chief executive told Cheshire Life that it gained B Corp certification in 2023 after an 18-month assessment of its governance, environmental impact and community work.

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 family name on a national agency.

The name has changed twice and kept the family in it. The company says it began as Cottage Holidays, became Sykes Cottages, and now trades as Sykes Holiday Cottages, while its web address still reads sykescottages.co.uk. Its earliest printed look, on its own account, was a set of hand-drawn line drawings of each cottage in a printed brochure; today the same job is done by property photographs and a website organised by region and by collection.

Those collections show what guests ask for. The company’s site groups cottages by place, from Yorkshire and the Lake District to Cornwall, Snowdonia, the Scottish Highlands and Ireland, and by features such as dog-friendly cottages, hot tubs, open fires and large houses for groups. Dogs matter more than most visitors might guess: the chief executive told Cheshire Life in 2024 that about 30 per cent of the company’s guests are accompanied by a dog.

The company also leans on outside recognition in its own copy. It says it won a British Travel Award in its category for large UK cottage and self-catering booking companies every year from 2013 to 2024, and that the Sunday Times has named it among the top 100 companies to work for; both are the company’s own statements.

For a design guide, Sykes Holiday Cottages shows how a family surname and a plain description can scale from a kitchen-table agency to a group, while the acquired regional brands keep their local names. Compare it with Cottages.com, the UK cottage brand of the Awaze group, and with Holiday Cottages, another UK cottage agency in this series. For this guide we use heather plum, mist and moss with a bookish serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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