What Alistair Sawday's is saying about Estate Escapes

In case you are wondering what others have been saying about our lovely cottages in the last year, feast your eyes:

http://www.sawdays.co.uk/special-places-es/britain/england/yorkshire/estate-escapes

and if this isn't enough from Alistair Sawday's Special Places then how about this write-up from Squidbeak

http://www.squidbeak.co.uk/review.php?ID=365

Spring is in the Air at Estate Escapes

Spring is just around the corner and I've not posted a blog in ages! My new year's resolution was to write one a month, and I failed in January but I have a reasonable excuse - sickness! If there's a virus out there, we are bound to have had it since Christmas, fortunately we are all on the mend in the Carver household and looking forward to warmer and sunnier days ahead.

My mission this year is to write about people or places connected to the cottages - www.estateescapes.co.uk, we've got a host of people we're working with who we think are brilliant including the Thai Chef, Tip, who can make fabulous banquets for you on the night or can deliver a delicious curry for four people and have it waiting for you when you arrive at the cottages. I'm trying to suggest as many great ideas as possible for our guests, some more costly than others not all are expensive, some won't cost you a penny.

But, I thought I'd start by mentioning the excellent news that Le Tour de France is coming to Yorkshire in 2014. So just in case you haven't heard, Yorkshire is hosting Le Grand Depart of Le Tour de France in 2014 and isn't that just amazing! The team of people at Welcome To Yorkshire really pulled it out of the bag beating off competition from much warmer climes and bigger, more influential destinations. Well done to them. We are already on a count down.

All the details for the route on Day 1 and Day 2 can be found on the Welcome to Yorkshire http://www.yorkshire.com/ dedicated website http://letour.yorkshire.com/ so to all those yellow jersey chasers out there, we suggest you consider booking your accommodation now... don't leave it too late. For your information, the nearest part of the route to the cottages is going to be in York. We are taking bookings for July 2014.

Talking of bookings, we've been making changes (nothing stands still at Estate Escapes, we don't ever want to be accused of resting on our laurels) to our website. We understand that an increasing number of potential guests would like to be able to book as soon as they see what they like on the internet so we've installed a new booking system courtesy of SuperControl and so far so good. Guests have already started booking themselves in and paying via credit card - that's something else we can do. The booking process is much simpler and easier to use and it means that the availability calendar is absolutely up to date - ALWAYS!

Finally before I dash to pick up the boy from school, we've once again been shortlisted for a local tourism award - Best Self Catering category. The REYTAs as they are known (Remarkable East Yorkshire Tourism Awards) are to be held in March and once again the competition is fierce. The judge is coming to take a look on Thursday this week...no need to panic then!

Half Term is just around the corner and we are fully booked, good news for us, sorry if we can't help you this time, get booking for Easter!