Meet the duo running Tewkesbury Park: Patrick Jones and Claire White

Patrick Jones is the general manager, and Claire White the commercial director, at Gloucestershire golf resort Tewkesbury Park. They talk about how the venue has been transformed in the last decade.

After a takeover followed by a £13m ten-year refurbishment programme, this previously-unheralded 93-bedroom hotel has become a serial award-winner including being placed inside The Sunday Times Top 100 British Hotels, and being named the number one meetings and conferences venue in the UK and Ireland by Condé Nast Johansens. It is also currently ranked inside Golf World’s Top 50 UK Golf Resorts.

But in 2014, the hotel and its golf course were floundering after multiple ownership changes and failed management plans.

How did the McIntosh family turn Tewkesbury Park’s fortunes around?

Claire White: It all started with our family’s passion for golf, really. In 2014 my brother Chris McIntosh was looking for a commercial investment, and he found Tewkesbury Park, close to Junction 9 of the M5 motorway, and only an hour from Birmingham or Bristol. It stood on the top of a hill, with wonderful views of the Cotswolds and nearby Tewkesbury and Cheltenham, with the beautiful Malvern Hills also visible in the distance. But the resort was definitely under par. So we got our heads together, to decide what we should do!

I had achieved a masters in management with HR after doing a French and German degree at Oxford University. My early career was with Mitchells & Butlers, a major UK operator of restaurants, pubs and bars, and I had then moved into property management. After Chris bought Tewkesbury Park, we decided to team up. We had no idea what challenges lay ahead, but we’d inherited a fabulous team of people. That was a good start.

We knew that rescuing this historic property would be tough, but we forged ahead with a comprehensive investment strategy to reposition Tewkesbury Park in the marketplace – and importantly we also managed to save around 80 jobs by keeping it open while we made changes so as not to disrupt the existing team, or the members of the health club and golf club. It was about doing the right thing, not the easy thing. It would have been easier to close, then refurbish, then reopen, but we felt that wasn’t the right thing to do.

But after 18 months something was still missing. That’s when we found Patrick.

Patrick Jones: I’d heard that Tewkesbury Park had new owners, and that they were doing a thorough job. I went there and had a look around. Immediately I thought that it could become an outstanding facility if done properly. I was inspired by what I saw, but it was definitely still looking quite tired. I knew that it would take significant investment and the application of a lot of tender loving care!

I was a professional hotelier having previously been with Swallow Hotels (now Marriott) and Virgin Hotels (now Handpicked Hotels), after gaining a hotel and catering management degree from the University of Surrey. At the time I was general manager at The Old Swan and Minster Mill in Oxfordshire. The Old Swan, which was a de Savary family property, was a former Hotel Of The Year, and it was quite similar to Tewkesbury Park: it had an emphasis on lifestyle and ambience, and had its own well-defined individual style.

Claire White: Soon after speaking with Patrick, I realised that we had a significant meeting of minds! He was a great personality match with us, and we shared the same vision: mid-market hotels get squeezed from both sides, so let’s not do that. Instead, Patrick wrote a visionary business plan for us, based on building a high quality independent establishment. And although things like Covid subsequently placed huge challenges in our path, we have more or less achieved that very same original plan and vision which Patrick presented to us.

Patrick Jones: When we looked into the UK golf market we found that there were plenty of ‘good golf, average hotel’ and ‘average golf, good hotel’ experiences out there. Putting it simply, we decided to have a ‘good golf, good hotel’ strategy! The location gave us a big advantage: in the rough triangle between Birmingham, Bristol and Oxford, there aren’t many direct competitors to Tewkesbury Park.

It is very common in the industry to find hotels with lots of front-end gloss, but with a weak back-of-house setup. I knew I could help Claire, Chris and the team to avoid that, so in November 2015 I was lucky enough to join the business while it was still in an early evolutionary stage. Claire and the family had shown great integrity in taking over and keeping it open, doing the harder thing and showing loyalty to the existing team rather than putting jobs at risk. I liked that.

Claire White: Early on we began to invest heavily in upgrading the condition of our largest asset – the golf course. First we bought new Toro machinery, and then we appointed Paul Hathaway as course manager. This proved to be a good decision, to say the least!

Patrick Jones: Paul Hathaway is an amazing individual. He and his team have transformed the golf course here at Tewkesbury Park, and continue to present it in amazing condition to this day. Early on we also brought in two very good advisors – John Clarkin from Turfgrass, the golf course management and maintenance experts, and Peter McEvoy OBE, one of British golf’s key figures and a successful golf architect. Together they have experience of hundreds of golf course projects around the world, including preparing courses for the US Open and Solheim Cup.

Claire White: Peter and John gave Paul Hathaway and his team tremendous assistance, and along with Chris McIntosh in his role as owner and chief golfer in the family, they all began to implement an extensive series of refurbishments on the golf course including much work on the bunkers and our other playing surfaces.

Patrick Jones: The world-famous golf architect Frank Pennink, whose Vilamoura Old Course in Portugal is among the most revered in the Algarve, was the original designer of our par 72 18-hole golf course, which we call The Deerpark. It is now widely acknowledged as being one of the best-conditioned golf courses in the west of England, especially during periods of bad weather. What Paul and the greens team have achieved in that regard is truly amazing – we tend to stay open much longer than other golf courses, when it rains.

We lost relatively few golf members during our transitional period. In fact they were willing us on to make improvements to a property of which they could then be proud! To his great credit, Chris McIntosh recognised the golf members’ loyalty to Tewkesbury Park, which had been sorely tested after being let down by previous owners through the years.

Golf is a sport to be enjoyed – it really isn’t life or death! If you lose the joy, you lose the appeal, so creating golfing spaces to be enjoyed – and the right environment away from the course – was very important to us. So we also shook up the traditional ways of thinking in golf – for example, there are no committees here, and we chose to introduce a lot more democracy. We’re proud of Fiona, our golf president, not because of her gender but because she’s the best person for the job and because she works tirelessly to promote Tewkesbury Park.

Claire White: Roughly a third of our golfing membership (which is currently at around 500) also have Resort membership with us, which means they can use all of our health club facilities including gym, swim, wellness and tennis.

Patrick Jones: We have seen the trends change in the UK golf industry, and Tewkesbury Park is adapting itself to embrace these trends. For example, there is clear movement, we believe, towards more and more groups, small or large, of friends who travel around to play different courses together. These golfers are challenging historic traditions as regards handicaps, and we are seeing a very welcome shift towards groups who are making their buying decisions based on the quality of the whole experience, rather than simply looking for cheap golf, a few hotel rooms and a handy bar.

Claire White: Whatever we are doing, seems to be working. We broke our all-time record as regards golf bookings in 2023, and are on course to do the same again in 2024. We haven’t had to rely on the well-known third-party golfing break operators to do this – it is all business which comes directly through our magnificent sales, reservations and reception teams.

Patrick Jones: Looking forwards, we believe that well-managed independent venues will increase in power, as customers are becoming much more discerning post-Covid. Society has changed, and people are increasingly looking for a more individually-tailored experience – something which matches their own personal behaviour values. Venues like ours still need to be looking at the large corporate places like the Forest Of Arden, Rudding Park, The Belfry and Celtic Manor, and positioning themselves to offer an equal challenge as far as the golf course goes, but we have found that offering a clearly-enhanced independent hotel experience pays great dividends.

However, away from the greens we faced an even greater challenge. Our hotel, health and conferencing facilities also needed to be transformed, or the whole project would fail.

Claire White: Ten years, and £13 million later, we are still making improvements

Patrick Jones: In the hospitality business, we never consider the job done. We look to improve continually – the Japanese call it Kaizen.

Right from the start we decided to push the whole product well up-market, while still staying true to certain key business segments – golf, short breaks, weddings and events, and the conference market. We also decided to improve our golf and health memberships.

Claire White: In spring 2016, for example, we invested around £1 million in just nine rooms – our Opulence and Indulgence rooms, which we call our historic suites. This became one of the key milestones in turning the business around. These rooms – which are presented to an extraordinarily high quality standard – helped to position Tewkesbury Park nationally at a whole new level, and created a completely new kind of credibility in the marketplace for the facility.

Patrick Jones: Over a six-year period, we also refurbished all other hotel rooms at Tewkesbury Park, including most recently adding private patios to all of our ground floor hotel rooms, and creating six special dog-friendly rooms – which have proven extremely popular! We are now proud of all guest bedrooms at Tewkesbury Park: every single one of our 93 rooms now has a stunning view, for example. There is no such thing as a weak guest bedroom at Tewkesbury Park – every visitor is guaranteed a memorable stay.

Claire White: We also made major improvements to our Mint restaurant, to our health, swim and wellness facilities, and we have invested heavily in improvements further behind the scenes including an all-new sustainable combined heat and power unit, which now heats our resort. But the opening, in summer 2017, of our Cotswold Suite meetings and conference centre was probably our biggest game-changer.

Patrick Jones: When Condé Nast Johansens named Tewkesbury Park as the number one meetings and conferences venue in the UK and Ireland in its 2023 awards, it was a huge reward for the team here. We were overjoyed: so much effort and teamwork had gone into transforming Tewkesbury Park, over the previous six years, into an international-class venue to host blue-chip product launches and business meetings.

Claire White: Speaking of teamwork, most of our heads of department here have multiple years of service. They have largely all been here since we started to make changes over ten years ago! Our core team has lived through not just the transitional period, but also through the very severe tests which Covid presented to the entire hospitality industry during 2020 and 2021.

Patrick Jones: Without doubt, it’s the team which brings this property alive. Because they worked through the transformation, they have become rightly proud of what’s been created, and they feel a strong degree of ownership in the success of the project.

Claire White: Even before the Condé Nast Johansens award, other accolades had been coming our way thick and fast. None more so than when, in late 2019, after much of our refurbishment work had been completed, The Sunday Times listed Tewkesbury Park among their 100 Great British Hotels. What a moment that was, when we heard the news.

Patrick Jones: Tewkesbury Park was one of only four golf hotels to be listed by The Sunday Times. The fact that the other three were Gleneagles, Roxburghe and Rockliffe Hall says volumes about the scale of our achievement. We were fantastically proud.

Claire White: Since then we have also appeared deep inside some of the most prestigious lists of golf resorts in Great Britain and Ireland, including appearing well inside several top 100s, which is a huge achievement considering where we were just ten years ago.

Golf, restaurant and images of people by Andy Hiseman. Rooms and Spa © Tewkesbury Park

Patrick Jones: From the moment that a golfer sinks into the Hypnos bed in their hotel room at Tewkesbury Park, they know they have made a good choice. They come here to feel relaxed, at a home from home. This is where our independence works in our favour. We can be a little quirky in our style, we can be very individual in our levels of service. Our staff are brilliant face-to-face with our guests. The team are free to make their own decisions, and be themselves. Independent venues have a slight advantage over the corporate world, in that respect. We are different.

Claire White: We believe that Tewkesbury Park now occupies a unique position in the British golf market, as the best small golf hotel in the nation, and we are hoping that many new friends will come to visit us – and to play The Deerpark – for the first time in 2025!