How We Worked With Cedar Court Hotels To Achieve 28% Direct Revenue Growth

Since August 2025, we have worked with Cedar Court Hotels, a group of independent hotels across Yorkshire (Harrogate, Bradford, and Huddersfield), to transform their marketing from reactive to proactive. The results speak for themselves: 28% year-on-year increase in direct revenue, over 31,000 clicks to the website from paid social, 246 wedding leads, and a. reach of 1.27M across PR in the first six months alone.

Cedar Court had invested significantly in their properties, offering characterful stays where Yorkshire heritage meets modern comfort. They were doing all the marketing work in-house and found themselves stretched.

We came in as an extension of their team to reposition the brand and focus on the values that matter to them: Proper Yorkshire Hospitality. Their objectives were clear: increase brand awareness, reduce reliance on OTAs and increase direct revenue, and expand their B2B pipeline.
Here’s how Punch Hospitality delivered those results through strategic integration and collaborative partnership.

Starting with the Diagnosis

Before we touched anything, we needed to understand what was actually happening. We conducted a comprehensive audit covering consumer trends, website performance, social media, email marketing, and PR.
The findings revealed that Cedar Court was operating reactively, with marketing efforts that weren’t aligned with commercial objectives and no consistent strategy tying everything together. The CCH team weren’t lacking in ambition or quality (quite the opposite!), they just needed a proactive framework to showcase their strengths effectively.
From our findings, we recommended a shift from reactive to proactive marketing, aligning brand and commercial strategies to increase direct revenue. We developed an ongoing marketing and PR strategy linked directly to Cedar Court’s commercial objectives with clear KPIs, covering digital transformation, paid media, employer brand, PR, and brand campaigns.

After identifying their audience, we pulled together their overarching campaign “Stay Proper”, helping the hotel stand out from cookie-cutter chains and lean into what makes them unique.

Building the Foundation

Your website isn’t a brochure, it’s a conversion machine, or at least, it should be.

The data confirms this – most hotel websites convert at less than one-third the rate of OTAs, which represents a massive revenue leak for independent properties.

We focused on removing friction and increasing visibility at every touchpoint, from enhancing booking form visibility and improving CTAs, to creating a research-backed SEO/GEO strategy and implementing ongoing accessibility and security updates.

Each change was small on its own, but together they transformed how the site performed.

Rehumanising B2B Marketing

As a client that encourages us to push the boundaries and help them stand out, we’ve been delighted to work on so many fun campaigns and moments with Cedar Court. B2B marketing in hospitality has earned itself a reputation for being corporate, boring, and emotionless, a combination that’s actively putting potential clients off rather than drawing them in.

82% of marketing leaders find B2B marketing boring and repetitive. If the people creating it are bored, imagine how the audience feels.

We took a different approach with Cedar Court. We supported their 2025 Yorkshire Pudding Wrapped campaign.

The concept was simple: lean into regional authenticity and inject personality into an otherwise sterile space. The campaign targeted agents and corporates with creative that felt human, not corporate.

The results for Yorkshire Pudding Run were fantastic:

• 1,506 agents visited
• 758 sign-ups
• £1.4 million in enquiries generated

This year, we’ve built on that foundation with the “’Ey Up Brew Up” campaign, using the same principle with evolved execution. The reception has been strong, proving that authenticity and emotion work in B2B, perhaps even better than in B2C.

Research supports this approach, revealing that B2B buyers are more emotionally connected to the brands they purchase from than B2C consumers, the transactional approach is gone, and emotional connection now drives decisions.

Cedar Court understood this principle immediately, and their willingness to take creative risks paid off in measurable ways.

Paid Strategy

Paid advertising only works when the infrastructure is in place, which is why we didn’t start with ads. We fixed the website first, developed the brand foundations, then deployed a research-backed paid strategy.

Our paid media campaign achieved the following over six months:

• Over 2M+ impressions
• 31k+ clicks
• 2.3M+ impressions from social media

Major hotel chains spend less than 2.5% of room revenue on marketing, whilst OTA giant Expedia invested $6.8 billion in marketing during 2024, representing 54% of its total revenue. Independent properties can’t outspend the OTAs, but they can outthink them.

Cedar Court demonstrated exactly that approach, choosing strategic thinking over budget battles.

Brand Foundations That Enable Growth

Without brand foundations, every campaign starts from scratch.

We developed comprehensive brand assets for Cedar Court, from employer brand guidelines and internal communications materials, to pull-up banners for B2B and B2C events, social media templates, and a complete F&B brand rollout for their Huddersfield restaurant, Harold’s.

These weren’t decorative, they were functional. They gave Cedar Court the infrastructure to maintain consistent market presence across every touchpoint.

Brand isn’t decorative fluff, it’s the foundational infrastructure that makes everything else work effectively.

The Integration Multiplier

Here’s what most agencies miss: improvements across multiple touchpoints don’t add up, they multiply.

A better website increases paid ad performance, stronger brand foundations make PR more effective, and humanised B2B campaigns drive agent engagement, which feeds into direct bookings.

Everything compounds when you get the integration right.

The Partnership Blueprint

Cedar Court’s success wasn’t just about what we did, it was about how we worked together.

Open communication was non-negotiable from the start. Cedar Court gave us the keys and let us run with it, whilst remaining enthusiastic about change, willing to challenge assumptions, and committed to the process.

That level of trust and collaboration is rare in client-agency relationships.

Most client-agency relationships fail because of misalignment, the client wants results but isn’t willing to change, whilst the agency delivers tactics but doesn’t challenge strategy. Everyone stays in their lane, and nothing transforms.

Cedar Court did the opposite by embracing the discomfort of change, trusting the process, and collaborating at every stage. That’s the blueprint for how clients and agencies should work together to achieve transformational results rather than incremental improvements.

What this means for Independent Hotel Groups

Cedar Court’s transformation reveals something important: independent hotels can compete with larger chains and OTAs, but not by doing what they’re doing.

You can’t outspend Expedia or match the brand recognition of Marriott, but you can out-think them, out-create them, and out-connect them.

The data supports this. Direct channels could potentially generate more than $400 billion of hotel gross bookings versus $333 billion from OTAs by 2030. Direct digital channels could overtake OTAs as the dominant hotel distribution channel.

That shift is already happening, and Cedar Court is ahead of it.

Our client relationship has firmly become a growing partnership, leading to many opportunities to continue broadening our scope of support with exciting campaigns and projects on the horizon.

Here’s what independent groups can learn from this:

Stop treating marketing as a series of isolated tactics. Website, paid ads, PR, B2B, they’re not separate, they’re parts of a system. Optimise the system, not the parts and keep them consistent!

Rehumanise your B2B marketing. Corporate doesn’t have to mean boring. Regional authenticity and emotional connection can cut through noise. Yorkshire Pudding Wrapped and ‘Ey Up Brew Up prove it.

Invest in brand foundations. Without consistent identity and infrastructure, every campaign starts from scratch, so build the foundation first.

Embrace open communication with your agency. The best results come from collaboration, not delegation, challenge assumptions, ask questions, and trust the process.

Focus on direct revenue. OTAs will always exist, but relying on them caps your growth and margins. Direct bookings are more profitable, and the infrastructure to drive them is within reach.

What’s next for Cedar Court

This is just year one for Cedar Court, the foundation is built, the systems are working, and the results are compounding.

We’re continuing to refine the paid strategy, expand PR reach, and evolve the B2B campaigns, whilst the website will keep improving and the brand will keep strengthening.
But the real story isn’t what we’re doing next, it’s what Cedar Court has already achieved.

They’ve proven that independent hotels can compete, shown that open communication and strategic partnership drive transformation, and demonstrated that rehumanising B2B marketing works.

If you’re an independent hotel group looking to break free from OTA dependency, increase direct revenue, and build a marketing strategy that actually compounds, the blueprint is here.

Cedar Court Hotels did it in one year, and you can too.