Success story:
The Coaching Inn Group

How The Coaching Inn Group are keeping everything connected across 43 properties

Product

The background

The Coaching Inn Group has had almost 3 decades delivering exceptional guest experiences across the UK, winning Hotel Group of the Year 2025 with Which? and has seen them expand into 43 properties. The group is driven by their ethos ‘Hospitality from the Heart’, showing a strong commitment to serving people and teams like family. They primarily specialise in traditional British buildings that evoke a rustic character, situated in market towns and smaller cities that create unique stays.

As each property operates independently, it is crucial that all systems are unified and connected to keep operations working seamlessly. From reservations to table management and payments, it is important that all these areas are working as one so guest are the focus, not disconnected technology. That’s why our partnership with the Coaching Inn Group has spanned nearly 20 years, as we ensure all 43 inns are delivering ‘Hospitality from the Heart’ every day with hotel management software that works together.

The challenge

Managing multiple products across a growing business

As the company started to expand, the technology requirements grew more and more. The group had a long history with our products at Access Hospitality using Access Guestline for hotel property management, Wireless Social for Wi-Fi marketing, Procure Wizard for procurement, Access Maintain for property maintenance and Access Collins for table management. Although the individual products worked well pre-migration to Access Hospitality, managing them all at once was becoming an issue.

Speaking to Mat Charity, Commercial and IT Director at the Coaching Inn Group, he explained that having separate account contacts for each product meant that support and cross-product queries would have no single point of communication. As Mat suggested, “nobody really got their arms around it.”

Multi-site support complexities

43 properties across the UK are fantastic, but when issues occur at more than 1 site, it can cause more complexity than a single-site hotel operation. When an issue arises, it’s usually handled internally and goes through an experienced chain of communication to find a solution.

The solution

A connected account management approach

Once these products came together under the umbrella of Access Hospitality Hotels, everything was now overseen by one single dedicated account manager. With all questions and issues going through one person, it eliminated the confusion and instead created a consistent relationship with the Coaching Inn Group team. Specialist product experts are still on hand for specific challenges, but all product and commercial conversations go through the dedicated account manager.

This has significantly improved the efficiency and overall confidence between us at Access Hospitality and at the Coaching Inn Group, as Mat explains:

“I can have cross-product conversations, whereas I couldn’t before, so it just feels a lot more efficient.”

A long-term hotel PMS partnership

The Coaching Inn Group has been an Access Guestline customer for nearly 20 years, with our hotel PMS functioning as the central system for their hotel management. It enables them to connect all their systems into one place with reservations, payments, guest data and distribution communicating into one platform. Over the course of our partnership, its depth of functionality and continued development made it one of the best products in the market, in Mat’s view.

The results

Over the past 2 decades, the Coaching Inn Group has seen and reaped the full benefits of our integrated products at Access Hospitality, and the numbers speak for themselves.

Procurement with Procure Wizard. £13.6 million in orders placed through Procure Wizard in the last 12 months, with £42,000 in credits generated.
Guest Wi-Fi and Marketing with Wireless Social. 3000 new user logins captured YOY on top of recurring sign-ins, building a growing database of guest data that supports the group's direct marketing and loyalty activity.
Accommodation Revenue through Access Guestline. Room revenue processed is estimated at £35-40 million annually across the 43 properties.

Looking ahead with Access Evo

The Coaching Inn Group has seen so many achievements with our products over the past 20 years, but it doesn’t stop there. Like many hoteliers, they want to create a seamless guest journey through one platform that recognises their room booking, table reservation and behaviours to create a more personalised experience. With Access Evo, Access Hospitality’s AI platform, all our products will be unified in one single interface to keep everything connected in real-time.

When speaking about this with Mat, he was enthusiastic about the prospects of an AI-powered platform and what it can bring to the business. As Mat explains:

“Technology is a big thing for us. We want to rock'n'roll with it. So, if there are ideas or demos or pilots, we're happy to get involved with that.”