Who is this for?
If you support rural businesses
We can work with destination management organisations. LVEPs and other rural tourism networks who want to raise experience quality and business resilience across their area.
Our programmes are structured, practical and built to deliver evidence of real change — useful for DMP reporting, funder relationships and board-level accountability.
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Who is this for?
Small Vineyard operators
We’ve been building a vineyard visitor experience since 2017. We know what works, what doesn’t, and what most vineyard owners never get told.
From cellar door design, glamping accommodation to sustainable vineyard management, we can help you identify your strengths, your weaknesses and what changes might work best to help your business grow
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Who is this for?
Rural Business Owners
Running your own rural business? It’s hard, we know. But it’s also your passion and you care.
Not every business fits neatly into a network programme. If you’re running your own farm, rural attraction or visitor experience and you’d like to step back and think with us, get in touch. We’ll work out together whether and how we can help make your enterprise thrive.
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RURAL TOURISM SUPPORT BODIES
The Kerner Programmes
A range of structured cohort programme for groups of rural tourism businesses. Designed for support bodies who need to move from strategy into measurable, on-the-ground improvement — and who need the evidence to prove it.
What the programmes do
Most destination strategies are clear about what they want to achieve. The harder question is how to turn that into real change at the level of individual businesses — the welcome at the door, the story the host tells, the experience a visitor carries home
The Kerner programmes can work with a cohort of 10–15 businesses across your area. Each business is assessed, supported and measured against six practical pillars of visitor experience. Bev leads the hospitality and experience design strand; Tim leads the regenerative business strand. Both are grounded in nearly a decade of doing this themselves at Astley Vineyard.
At the end of a programme, you have documented evidence of improvement — case studies, before-and-after data, and a report built for board and funder use.
“This is the kind of programme that is difficult to commission well. Most training scratches the surface. We work with businesses over time – and we measure what changes” Bev Haywood – The Kerner Partnership
What’s typically included
VINEYARD OWNERS
Building a Successful Vineyard Business
A full-day workshop for English vineyard owners who want to think seriously about their visitor offer — built by people who have spent nine years building one themselves.
Being a great vineyard manager is a full time job. Selling your wine can be another
The English wine sector has grown fast. The visitor experience hasn’t always kept pace. Most vineyard owners are brilliant at growing grapes. Turning that into a visitor business that people talk about, return to, and recommend — that’s a different skill set. And combining that with nurturing your land to build a regenerative
The Intentional Vineyard is a full-day working session for up to twelve vineyard owners. We cover the things that most hospitality training ignores: what your vineyard story actually is (and isn’t), how to design a visit that people remember, how to price for experience rather than volume, and how to think about the long-term relationship between your land, your wine and your guests.
We run it at Astley — so the context is real, not theoretical.
“We’ve made most of the mistakes you can make building a vineyard visitor business. The Intentional Vineyard is what we wish someone had told us.” — Bev Haywood
A Typical Workshop Day
What we could cover
1: Your story & what it’s worth. Finding what’s genuinely distinctive about your vineyard — and how to use it, including story telling and branding
2: Designing the visit. The moments that make a vineyard experience memorable — and the ones that quietly undermine it.
3: Pricing & yield. Moving from volume thinking to value thinking — without losing the people who matter.
4: Land, stewardship & the long game. Tim leads this session — the relationship between how you manage your land and the business you can build from it.
5. Investment – Helping you to assess what could be done vs what actually should be done. And understanding the difference.
INDEPENDENT RURAL BUSINESSES
Not every business fits a programme
If you’re running your own farm stay, rural attraction or visitor experience and you’d like to think with us about what you’re building — get in touch. We’re happy to have a conversation and work out whether and how we can help.
We occasionally work directly with individual businesses on a mentoring or advisory basis. We’re selective about this — it has to be the right fit. But if you think it might be, we should talk and find out.
What we might work on together
Visitor experience design — how your guests move through your place and what they feel at each stage.
Business clarity — what you’re actually selling, and whether your pricing reflects it.
Sustainable hosting — how your land and your business can support each other over the long term.
The welcome — how you and your team actually make people feel at home.
