Why I Left cottages.com to Build Something Different for West Wales Cottage Owners

By Evan Davies, Founder of StayGentic · Published 27 August 2026

I spent almost a decade at cottages.com, ending up as New Business Director, before leaving to start StayGentic, an independent holiday letting agency for Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and Ceredigion. I built it because I saw, from the inside, how thinly a national agency’s attention gets spread across thousands of properties. StayGentic offers the same reach owners expect, direct bookings plus Airbnb, Booking.com and VRBO, with the kind of personal attention a big agency structurally can’t give.

Nearly a decade inside a national agency

I spent close to ten years in holiday letting, most of it at cottages.com, part of the Awaze group. I started in a New Business development role and worked my way up, eventually becoming New Business Director. My job was acquiring new holiday properties, sitting across the table from owners, and understanding exactly what makes someone join an agency, stay loyal to one, or quietly start looking elsewhere.

Over those years I had hundreds of conversations with cottage owners across West Wales. I saw what a big agency does well. Brand recognition, distribution reach, booking infrastructure at scale, none of that is easy to build and I don’t dismiss it. But I also saw where the model struggles, and it struggles in a way that’s baked into its size rather than any individual person’s fault.

What I saw from the owner’s side of the desk

When a business is managing thousands of properties, the maths is simple and a bit uncomfortable. A marketing budget that sounds huge in a press release gets split across fifteen thousand listings, and a single cottage ends up with a few lines in a search algorithm and whatever generic brand advertising happens to land nearby. Owners rarely hear that number spelled out, but most of them can feel it. Their property becomes one of many, managed by whoever happens to be free that week, marketed with the same template as the cottage three doors down.

That’s not a criticism of the people doing the job. I was one of them. It’s just what happens at that scale. And the owners who came to me most often weren’t unhappy about commission rates, they were unhappy about feeling invisible.

The moment I decided to build something different

I kept coming back to the same thought: what if a holiday cottage got the reach of a national agency, direct bookings plus the major channels like Airbnb, Booking.com and VRBO, without losing the personal attention that only a small, local operation can give?

That’s the gap StayGentic is built to fill. Not a bigger version of what already exists, a more attentive one. I already had a small property management and changeover operation running across Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and Ceredigion, so I’d seen the local market from the ground up as well as from inside a national agency. Putting both sides of that experience together is what became StayGentic.

What StayGentic does differently

I look at every property myself. There’s no call centre, no account rotating between different people each time you ring. If you own a cottage with StayGentic, you’re dealing with someone who has actually run agency acquisition at scale and now chooses to spend that attention on a handful of properties instead of thousands.

Behind the scenes, StayGentic connects your property across the channels guests actually search, your own direct booking page, Airbnb, Booking.com and VRBO, with availability kept in sync automatically so there’s no manual calendar juggling and far less risk of a double booking. You don’t have to choose between direct bookings and OTA reach. Both work together.

Depending on where your property is, StayGentic can also take care of the operational side, changeovers, housekeeping, maintenance coordination and guest support, for owners who’d rather hand the whole thing over. Plenty of owners are happy managing that themselves and just want better marketing and bookings. Either way works.

If you’re still weighing up whether now’s the right time, our free property readiness check is a no-obligation way to get an honest look at how your listing is performing before you decide anything.

Built for West Wales, not for everywhere

StayGentic isn’t trying to be a national brand with a Welsh postcode bolted on. It’s built around Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and Ceredigion specifically, Tenby, St Davids, Saundersfoot, Narberth, Newport, the whole Cardigan Bay coastline. That local focus matters for guests searching for a genuine West Wales stay, and it matters for owners who want an agency that actually knows the difference between a cottage near the harbour in Tenby and one tucked outside St Davids.

The Founding Collection

I’m currently selecting the first properties for what I’m calling the StayGentic Founding Collection, a small group of genuinely excellent cottages that will prove this model works before I take on any more. The plan is deliberately modest to start with, the first two to five properties, done properly, rather than a rush to list as many as possible.

If that sounds like your cottage, I’d love to see it.

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