How Laik Boosts Holiday Let Occupancy by Focusing on Design and Guest Experience
Marta Pawlik, Co-Founder & Director of Laik, shares how their Lake District holiday let business stands out by prioritizing stylish interiors and attentive guest care. This interview uncovers why design shifts and authentic guest touches drive their high occupancy rates and repeat bookings.
In this edition of the Ecommerce Authority Playbooks series, we dive into how
Laik grows, retains customers, and prepares for the future of search in 2026 and beyond.
The interview
1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?
Marta Pawlik: Laik started because I kept seeing the same problem when I looked at holiday lets across the Lake District. Owners had beautiful properties in stunning locations, but the interiors and the guest experience felt like an afterthought, tired sofas, mismatched linens, zero personality. My co-founder and I saw an opening to treat holiday letting as a hospitality business first and a property business second, so we built Laik around design, styling, and genuinely attentive guest management rather than just listing a property and hoping for bookings. That combination is still what sets us apart. Most letting agents in this region manage properties. We design them, style them, and then manage them with the same care, which is a big part of why we sit at 70 to 80 percent occupancy against a regional average closer to 53 percent.
2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?
Marta Pawlik: The clearest turning point was when we stopped treating design and development as a nice add-on and made it a core service line, offering owners full décor makeovers and installations like hot tubs rather than just management. Properties that went through a proper styling refresh consistently outperformed untouched ones on both occupancy and nightly rate, and owners noticed. That single shift changed how owners saw us, not as an agency taking a cut, but as a partner actively increasing the value of their asset. It also taught me that in this industry, the biggest lever for occupancy usually isn’t marketing spend or platform tweaks, it’s the physical product itself. A beautifully styled property with a hot tub and a log burner sells itself long before an ad ever runs.
3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?
Marta Pawlik: Direct bookings through our own site and repeat or referral bookings from past guests are what really move the needle for us, alongside strong organic visibility through press coverage and our blog content. Features in places like The Times, The Independent, and Glamour bring a wave of high-intent traffic that platforms like Airbnb simply can’t replicate, because people arrive already trusting the recommendation. What I’ve learned is that in holiday letting, guest experience is basically your marketing budget. A guest who has a five-star stay tells friends, comes back for a different property in our portfolio, and searches for us by name next time rather than starting from a generic search on a booking marketplace. That compounding effect from genuine word of mouth and press has been far more valuable long term than anything we’ve spent on paid ads.
4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?
Marta Pawlik: We’ve noticed a real shift in how people plan Lake District trips, more of them arriving with a question already half answered by an AI assistant, asking things like best dog friendly cottages near Windermere with a hot tub rather than typing a generic search term. So we’ve leaned harder into writing genuinely specific, detailed content on our blog and property pages, real detail about which villages suit families versus couples, which properties actually have decent mobile signal, honest notes on parking and walking distance to the shops. That kind of specificity seems to be exactly what these AI tools pull from and recommend, whereas vague marketing copy gets ignored by both humans and machines. We haven’t chased any AI SEO trend for its own sake, but we have doubled down on writing like we’re answering a real question from a real guest, because that has turned out to be the same thing that keeps us visible in traditional Google search too.
5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?
Marta Pawlik: The biggest one is simply remembering people. If a guest mentions on arrival it’s their anniversary or that their dog is nervous around new places, we make a note, and next time they book with us that detail shows up again in a small welcome touch, a bottle of something for the anniversary, extra treats left out for the dog. It sounds small, but it turns a transaction into a relationship, and that’s exactly why 95 percent of our 4,000 plus guests leave five star reviews. Alongside that, our blog and travel guides do a lot of quiet work keeping past guests engaged between trips, since people come back to read new area guides and start dreaming about their next stay long before they’re ready to book again.
6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?
Marta Pawlik: I would tell them to double down on the physical product experience before spending another pound on acquisition, because no amount of clever marketing fixes a mediocre stay, and in a reviews driven industry that mediocrity gets amplified, not hidden. Every pound we’ve put into styling, small comfort touches, and genuinely solving guest pain points has paid back many times over in occupancy and repeat bookings, more than any single ad campaign ever has. What I’d tell them to stop entirely is chasing every new platform or booking channel just because it exists. We tried spreading ourselves across too many listing sites early on and it diluted our brand and made guest experience harder to control consistently, so we pulled back and focused on fewer channels where we could actually manage quality properly.
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