SCHLOSS Roxburghe

Set in the elegant countryside of the Scottish Borders, 5-star manor house hotel SCHLOSS Roxburghe was once owned by the Duke of Roxburghe, and is now part of the exclusive Destination by Hyatt collection. A little more than an hour’s drive from both Edinburgh and Newcastle, SCHLOSS Roxburghe welcomed an extensive expansion in November 2022 with the opening of the new Estate House, hosting an additional 58 rooms to the Manor House’s 20, as well as a purpose-built banqueting suite, extensive spa facilities and several self-catering cottages across the grounds.

With over 300 acres of land including 2.5 miles of the River Teviot, Trout Loch, beautiful parkland and Estate gardens, this is the perfect hotel to enjoy nature and the great outdoors. Activities lie at the heart of the SCHLOSS Roxburghe, and guests can enjoy a round of golf on the Championship Course, fly fishing on the river or Trout Loch, archery, country sports, or Clay Pigeon Shooting at the newly refurbished Shooting Centre.

SCHLOSS Roxburghe’s expansive kitchen garden and fishing grounds give the hotel ample opportunity to create a sustainable ‘estate-to-plate’ menu that diners will love, with ingredients that cannot be grown or caught on site sourced from Scottish producers wherever possible. The newly-opened Estate Market Farm Shop also focuses on local, sustainably-sourced produce from around Scotland, rather than flown-in food.

• SCHLOSS Roxburghe’s expansive kitchen garden and fishing grounds give the hotel ample opportunity to create a sustainable ‘estate-to-plate’ menu that diners will love, with ingredients that cannot be grown or caught on site sourced from Scottish producers wherever possible.
• The newly-opened Estate Market Farm Shop focuses on local, sustainably-sourced produce from around Scotland, rather than flown-in food.
• The newly-opened Kio Kids’ Club teaches children about sustainable practices and environmental awareness, with activities including learning about water cycles and local wildlife.

A former Duke's manor house in the Scottish Borders does not, on the face of it, scream winter adventure break.

It reads as heritage. Grand. Possibly a bit hushed. Which is lovely, and entirely wrong for what SCHLOSS Roxburghe had actually built - a country sports centre, a new spa, and an outdoor offering that deserved a considerably younger audience than "heritage manor house" was ever going to attract.

You don't fix that with a press release. You fix it by showing people.

Lemongrass Marketing, a B Corp-certified travel PR agency in Oxfordshire, delivered a winter influencer activation for SCHLOSS Roxburghe, a historic manor house hotel and estate in the Scottish Borders.

That's an average of 31 pieces of content per influencer - and a conversation that kept running for a full week after everyone went home.

The brief was to showcase SCHLOSS Roxburghe's winter product - driving organic engagement, growing the property's social audience, and highlighting both its range of outdoor activities and its newly refurbished spa.

The subtext was harder. The property had been extensively refurbished, adding new rooms, cottages, a restaurant, spa and country sports centre. Prospective guests who'd formed a view of SCHLOSS Roxburghe from its history hadn't necessarily updated it. And winter - traditionally the hardest season to fill in the Borders - was where that gap cost the most.

We picked for fit, then reach - in that order

Five influencers, 529k combined following.

We could have found one creator with the same reach on their own. We deliberately didn't. Five voices, each credible with their own audience for outdoor and winter content, generates more content, more angles and more social proof than one large account delivering a single post that reads like an advert.

The follower count is the last thing we look at. It's the number clients ask about first, and it's the one that predicts results least reliably.

We briefed for honesty, not for messaging

Creators were asked to capture the outdoor activities and new spa facilities in a way that felt natural and experience-led. No scripted lines. No shot lists imposed from the outside.

Audiences have become extremely good at spotting a paid post pretending not to be one, and the moment they do, everything downstream stops working. The content that performs is content the creator would plausibly have made anyway.

We built a trip designed to generate content, not just impress

There's a real difference between hosting a lovely stay and designing an itinerary that produces something worth posting every few hours. Varied activities, changing settings, genuine moments - the trip was structured so that creators had a constant supply of things worth capturing.

That's why the output was 157 pieces rather than the 20 or so a standard hosted stay produces.

The activation generated 157 pieces of content across five influencers reaching a combined 529,000 followers.

More telling: in the week after the trip ended, SCHLOSS Roxburghe was mentioned 135 times. The content kept generating conversation long after the creators had left - which is the difference between an activation and an advert.

How many influencers should a hotel host on a single trip? It depends on the objective, but multiple mid-sized creators typically outperform a single large account for content volume and social proof. SCHLOSS Roxburghe's activation hosted five influencers with a combined 529k reach, generating 157 pieces of content.

How do you measure influencer activation success beyond follower count? Content volume, brand mentions in the period following the activation, engagement quality, and audience growth are all stronger indicators than reach alone. SCHLOSS Roxburghe recorded 135 brand mentions in the week after the trip concluded.

Which agency runs influencer activations for SCHLOSS Roxburghe? Lemongrass Marketing, a specialist travel PR agency and certified B Corp based in Bicester, Oxfordshire. The agency has also delivered digital PR and backlink audit work for the property.

Do influencer trips work for heritage properties? Yes, particularly where a property's public perception has fallen out of step with its current offering. Influencer content is an effective way to demonstrate new facilities and reposition a heritage property for a younger audience.