Stays in the vines

Stays in the Vines was founded in 2009 by Dave and Sue, two corporate IT escapees who had been running very successful accommodation businesses in the Hunter Valley, including Hunter Valley Stays for a number of years.  

Our goal was to create a selection of properties for groups visiting the Hunter Region. Our philosophy was to provide high quality accommodation options in beautiful locations and present a stylish comfortable environment with attention to detail. Combine this with friendly individual customer service = the key to success. 

We have also developed a number of services to complete the guest experience including Dine in the Vines, offering catering services including your own personal chef for a special lunch or dinner, a range of gourmet drop off meals and platters. Tours in the Vines, wine tours where you meet the winemakers and walk through the vineyards, transfers from the properties to golf, restaurants or concerts and other experience packages.   Events in the Vines, which uses the wonderful properties under the Stays in the Vines portfolio for small conferences and meetings or special events and celebrations.

Stays in the Vines can provide a personal and unique end-to-end event experience for small groups.  For business and corporate groups it provides a relaxed atmosphere, allowing a great relationship-building environment for delegates and encourages those creative juices to flow.  Our suite of services enables business to receive the support they need to manage the myriad of details associated with meetings and events.

Mission Statement

“Our mission is to delight and satisfy our guests by providing a holiday experience in the Hunter Valley Region that meets and often exceeds guest expectation and to consistently achieve 4-5 star ratings in our customer feedback”

How do we do this? 

• By delivering genuine, personal, professional and friendly customer service.
• By ensuring that our staff know the properties intimately to enable them to give helpful answers and advice.
• By ensuring that each and every one of our unique properties is presented to a high standard.
• By providing absolutely everything our guest would expect in a quality self contained property.
• By providing value added services to enhance our customer’s experience.

Community

Stays in the Vines are committed to making a positive difference in the communities in which we live and work.  We do this by supporting charities, local businesses, local activities and arts companies that make a difference. We have a commitment to Environmental Sustainability through use of environmentally friendly products and our endeavors to reduce the carbon footprint in our properties.

Charity

Stays in the Vines shares in this vision and is proud to support Children’s Cancer Institute Australia CCIA as our Charity Partner.

Prior to the 1960s the survival rate for children with cancer was less than 2%. Thanks to enormous advances in medical research, the survival rate for childhood cancer has risen to 70% today. Even with dramatic increases in the cure rates over the past 50 years, three Australian children still die each week from childhood cancer. Cancer is the largest killer of children from disease in Australia, with every year more than 600 children being diagnosed. Our research is aimed directly at improving these statistics.   Founded in 1976 by a small but dedicated group of parents, researchers and doctors to undertake medical research into childhood cancer, Children's Cancer Institute Australia for Medical Research (CCIA) opened its first research laboratory in 1984.

CCIA is the only independent medical research institute in Australia dedicated to research into the causes, prevention, better treatments and ultimately a cure for childhood cancer.

Performing Arts

Stays in the Vines supports the performing arts with two Sydney icons.

Belvoir Street Theatre - When the Nimrod Theatre building in Belvoir Street, Surry Hills, was threatened with demolition in 1984, more than 600 people – ardent theatre lovers  together with arts, entertainment and media professionals, formed a syndicate to buy the building and save this unique performance space in inner city Sydney.  Over 25 years later, this space, known as Belvoir St Theatre, continues to be the home of one of Australia’s most celebrated theatre companies. Belvoir engages Australia’s most prominent and promising playwrights, directors, actors and designers to realise an annual season of work that is dynamic, challenging and visionary.

Glen Street Theatre is the largest professional theatre venue and an industry leader on Sydney’s North Shore and Northern Beaches, presenting an annual season of professional theatre productions including an annual Main Stage Season, KidsPlay - family and children programming stream, Music at the Glen, Literary Lunches and a range of other theatre related events.  Glen Street  Theatre regularly presents productions from many of Australia’s major performing arts companies.

Community activity

Stays in the Vines support a number of local community activities including.

Broke Fordwich Village Fair and Vintage Car Display – The fair is held in September each year in McNamara Park in Broke Village.  The local school, bush fire brigade, churches and Village Hall all benefit from money raised on the day.

Hunter Valley protection alliance and Lock the Gate - The future viability of the iconic Hunter Valley wine and tourism region is at stake as a result of invasive industrial activity – in the form of mining for coal seam gas (CSG).  HVPA is are calling for a halt on CSG exploration and mining until the long term environmental, aesthetic and social impacts are fully understood.

Endeavour Industries Ltd – Endeavour Industries is a community based not-for-profit organisation that exists to provide a range of services to assist people living with disabilities. Endeavour aims to provide the widest possible range of services to support people living with disabilities in our community.

Environmental Efforts

• We are doing our part to contribute to environmental sustainability. Some of our initiatives include:
• Migrating properties to LED lighting to reduce electricity consumption.
• Housekeeping use environmentally friendly chemicals where possible.
• We buy in bulk to reduce packaging.
• Our properties use on site aerated wastewater treatment systems producing safe clean water for irrigation.
• We are striving towards a paperless office.
• We encourage recycling at all our properties including food scraps for animals where applicable.

Our team is passionate about customer service. We love making sure our guests go home feeling like they want to come back !

Bookings Co-ordinator - Jenny 

Bookings and Social Media - Rebecca

Administration - Casey

Housekeeping - Kathleen

Catering - Ben and Jayce

Business owners - Sue (Sales and Marketing) and Dave (Finance and Operations)

Stays in the Vines and Australia Stays - have developed a full front-end system that handles all call management, and booking management. The bookings element provides a complete customer leads and enquiry management service including all communication with the guests, correspondence, telephone liaison, payments, security deposits, checking in and out service and feedback surveys.

We provide extensive marketing including website and listing maintenance, online and phone bookings, marketing and consultancy services. The consultancy and marketing service cover all areas from basic setup, interior design and layout, branding of the property through property bios, profiles, graphic design and web development. We have an office that is open six days a week with friendly experienced booking staff on the end of the phone that know the properties, their layouts and floor plans and can discuss each individual property with confidence.

We have invested heavily in building
 an interactive website, to enhance the user experience and integrated it with our new CRM (customer relationship management) system. Our CRM is an end-to-end property management system incorporating trust accounting, email and SMS marketing, housekeeping, maintenance management and customer/owner bookings management. Our owners also have access to performance metrics and all the financials relating to their property, including visibility to all the deposits we are holding on the owner’s behalf.

Included in the service (if required) we can process invoices for housekeeping, linen services, garden maintenance etc, on the owner’s behalf and provide an itemised record on your monthly account making life simple for you (and your accountant). We will also take phone calls from guests staying at the property if you are not available.

We take the stress out of running holiday accommodation with our full circle marketing and management service.
We market your property through a number of different websites, media and location agencies. We attend relevant trade shows and belong to industry groups so we can track market trends. We have partnership agreements with Belvoir Street and Glen Street Theatre in Sydney to market our properties through their large audiences. We have over 10,000 contacts in our database and this is growing each day.

We deal with the clients from their initial enquiry until they close the door at the end of their stay...but we don’t finish there. We do a feedback report and survey of each client and add them to our extensive database to ensure that we communicate with them on a regular basis through professional newsletters. We also provide the added value of a catering, tours, events and information service. If they want a special cake, flowers in the room, a personal chef, beauty treatments, we can arrange this for them . . . a one stop, stress free shop. 

Why turn your property into Holiday Rental

Boutique self contained holiday rentals are
a rapidly growing market in Australia and is forecast to increase by 30% over the next 12 months. Many owners have their properties set up as full time holiday rentals as they are second homes and they only want to use them at selected times throughout the year. Some owners have found it difficult to sell their properties, especially in the current market conditions and use Stays in the Vines and Australia Stays as a means of making a substantial income whilst maintaining the property.

They are able to build the property into
 a successful business making it a more
 viable proposition for buyers if they decide 
to sell. Others enjoy running the property
or business but just find the task of the marketing and bookings, client management and correspondence overwhelming and just want to free themselves from this part of the business. An important reason for making your property into a business is if is set up as a commercial entity, it is possible to make tax deductions and allowances against it. Anyone who has tried to set up and run successful holiday rentals will agree, it takes a whole 
lot of time and energy and can be a logistic nightmare.

Most people are too busy to manage and market their property and deal with the day- to-day communications, payments, merchant facilities, correspondence and accounting that goes hand in hand with making the property successful. There are also cleaning logistics, linen services and the myriad of other tasks that are required. If a property is left empty for long periods it means that it is not producing income for a large percentage of the year and it can also cause problems with inviting vermin and insect infestation and can cause security problems. If run correctly and professionally, a holiday home can return up to 250% net more than leasing the property to a tenant. It also allows the owner the convenience of the use the property when required and maintains the property in good condition.

What we offer

Front End Management and property management - (full property management is available in the Central Coast and Hunter Valley Regions only) 
For those people that want to be stress free and leave everything to us.

Full marketing, booking and client management service (including all payments) plus access to housekeeping and owner accounts. We look after stocking of all grocery, consumables, linen and cleaner management plus lawns and maintenance management.

Front End Management only – (available Australia wide)  where owner/manager is on site or in the vicinity

The front end management is based on the owner or a manager being able to handle all property management issues. We offer a full marketing, booking and client management service (including all payments) plus access to owner accounts. You handle the property management logistics.  In short, Stays in the Vines and Australia Stays handle everything up to the client arrival including all marketing, correspondence, booking, payment and communication.

Please contact Sue sue@staysinthevines.com.au  to discuss your property's potential.