The 2018 Glamping Show has been chosen as the venue to launch a competition with a chance to win The Dome Garden – a top UK Glamping Village and B&B, just north of Bristol in the Forest of Dean, with a cash alternative of £200,000
All for just £10!
The Dome Garden consists of 11 glamping domes capable of accommodating up to 50-60 people. It comes with a small guest house which includes owners accommodation, a residents bar, 3 iconic letting bedrooms and a small restaurant. It’s all contained inside an acre and a half of beautiful landscaped gardens.
The whole site cost £1,000,000 to set up and build and is now a well-established, profitable operation with a good income and an amazing owners lifestyle. It’s hugely popular with corporate clients and families alike, some of whom have been coming back every year for the past 7 years. It currently operates for around 7 months a year, from Easter to the end of the Autumn half term.
Based around a 200 year old forest lodge, right inside the 25,000 acres of ancient natural woodlands, that is the Royal Forest of Dean, the entire operation is being offered, lock, stock and freehold barrels, as the winning offering in a prize draw competition being run over the next 16- 20 months. Competitors will pay just £10 to enter a word play competition which, if answered correctly, will qualify them for entry into a prize draw at the end of the competition.
Ideally the competition winner will take over ownership and control of the entire Dome Garden properties and operation in the run-up to the main 2020 holiday season. But If the winner of the glamping site doesn’t actually want it(!) and would prefer to buy a flash car (or whatever) instead – they can walk away with an alternative prize of £200,000. Also, if not enough tickets are sold (less than 150,000) to release the Glamping site, a smaller backup prize of up to £150,000 and up to 40 holiday vouchers will be offered instead.
“The competition itself is a real task!” says owner and founder Jonny Clothier. “It’s not allowed to be easy, so you have to exercise skill to get through it, but we think the end result is more than worth the effort; either the keys to an operation that cost a million pounds, a £200,000 alternative or a backup prize of up to £150,000, all for just a tenner.
“This is a chance to live in a unique, extraordinary environment, running a business that is satisfying and demanding but only takes up just over half of the year. Unlike us, you don’t have to spend £1,000,000 for the chance of owning it – just £10.”
The Competition
Corporate events at the Dome Garden end with a highly competitive word game. So, the competitive element in this competition will use a similar word game with crossword style clues that need answers. Skill levels vary with each attempt and some of the clues are particularly difficult, so not all entries will be successful. Everything relates to the Dome Garden in some way, but it needs lateral thought and deduction to come up with the right answer – you won’t be able to just look it up! And the clues will change over time to make sure.
All correct answers will result in that entry being passed through to the final prize draw.
Entry
Each attempt at entry will cost £10 – although competitors at The Glamping Show will get an additional free attempt for every ticket purchased. On completion of your attempt you will be given the option to add an extra clue for another £10 and another chance at entry.
All competitors must be at least 18 years old but there is no barrier to the number of attempts made by an individual, so the more tickets you buy, the greater the chance of success. Outside the glamping show, after 4 attempts, each competitor will get an extra attempt for free.
Every correct attempt will give you one entry to the prize draw and the chance to win the Dome Garden (or the backup prize of up to £150,000)
All for just a tenner.
Timescale
The driving force for this competition is simple; to find a new owner for the Dome Garden. So we want to give it time to succeed.
We will plan to run the competition from the end of September 2018 until at least the 2019 Glamping Show, but with the possibility of extending the end date until Christmas 2019 or even Easter 2020 at the very latest.
Ideally, if enough tickets have been sold, the winner will receive The Dome Garden as the main prize. If they can’t go through with it for any reason, we think the alternative offer of £200,000 is still a huge chunk of money for investing just a tenner.
Either way it will still change someone’s life for the better. Further proof that the “Dome Garden Magic” always works for the best.
Number of Tickets and Revenue
To keep the odds at a reasonable level we will limit the number of paid tickets to a maximum of 250,000 and the Dome Garden will only form the main prize if the minimum number of 150,000 entries are sold. If we reach the maximum number at any time, we will end the competition immediately. Notice will be given on the competition website if we pass the minimum number so people will have an idea of how it’s going.
If, by the time the competition closes, the ticket sales haven’t reached the minimum number we will create an alternative prize fund instead. This will provide a single winners prize of up to £150,000, as well as up to 40 runners up prizes of holiday vouchers, worth £400 each, for the Dome Garden itself. The actual numbers here will depend entirely on how many tickets have been sold.
The cost of running the competition will be met out of the ticket revenue and if there is any surplus generated it will be ploughed back into new projects, which you can read about below.
Summary
With each investment of just £10 here are the outcomes:
If Enough Tickets Are Sold
- One Prize – Debt free, Freehold ownership of the Dome Garden and The Lodge Rooms businesses, the physical property (known as Perch Lodge) and any websites associated with it. Or £200,000 cash alternative.
If Not Enough Tickets Are Sold
- Main prize – up to* 150,000 cash prize
- Runners up prizes – Up to 40 £400 vouchers towards a Dome Garden holiday. (The exact amounts of these will depend on ticket sales minus costs and calculated when the completion closes).
All correct entries will also receive 5 % discount off any subsequent single dome booking during 2019. That alone is worth up to £40 – right there!!!
We hope these are a pretty good set of options – for just a tenner.
The Dome Garden
The entire Dome Garden concept is the brainchild of Jonny and his wife Helen, who started building it in 2010 – since then around 15,000 glampers have passed through its doors and regularly write glowing reviews on review sites around the internet.
“The Dome Garden is quite simply beautiful. It’s like living in another world, right in the heart of the forest, right up against the enormity of the woods and the animals that live there, where you wake to the sound of the loudest dawn chorus imaginable.
“This is a unique opportunity and a very special place” says Helen “and we’re doing all we can to make sure someone will win it all, over the next 18 months or so.”
“However, it’s not just a business or a piece of real estate that is on offer. This is an entire life experience that will affect you, and everyone around you, in ways no ordinary house move or new career could possibly do.
Our Story
As successful executives in Central London, Jonny & Helen were used to a crazy, busy life with great careers, three small children and complex childcare arrangements. “We came home at the weekends, collapsed for a couple of days, said ‘Hi’ to the kids, entertained friends and then started the entire routine over again. Looking back, it was awful, but we never stopped long enough to realise it.
“This life is completely different. We love it with all our hearts, partly because it’s such a varied and fascinating business, but also because it’s changed our lives completely and made us connect with things that really matter. “
It’s an experience that has involved their entire family, deepening their relationship with their children – who many of the guests have met on many occasions – and allowed them to watch them grow and develop in front of their eyes.
“We now have three lovely, self-reliant, well-grounded kids who are so much more able and confident than so many of their peers. We put a lot of that down to the influence of having been involved in this project for most of their lives.
“When we first wrote the website for the Dome Garden we wrote about “The Dome Garden Magic”, not really knowing if it actually existed. What we have learnt in the intervening years is that it does, absolutely, exist and our time here, as a connected family unit, has been filled with it.
If It’s This Good, How Can We Leave?
“Every project has a life and we have put so much of our own into making this what it is. The children are now spreading their wings and it feels, as we complete the latest B&B room, that our time here should also draw to a close.
“It doesn’t mean there is nothing left to do or that we’re in any rush. Far from it, there‘s tons to get on with! Another dome, more rooms, a slight change of direction to reflect the maturing process of the glamping industry and meet the expectations of a new breed of glampers. So, lots of options and exciting decisions still to be made, lots of routes and opportunities to increase revenues, lots of ways to steer the ship over the coming years.
“But, it’s a business at a stable point, which we hope will be given away to the winner, with no encumbrance other than a healthy slate of bookings, ready for a new phase. If the winner has money to invest, or a property to sell, so much the better, they can do so with the advantage of having acquired the entire Dome Garden property for just a tenner.
If, in the end, they don’t actually want it, that’s fine too. We will give them £200,000 in cash instead – right there and then. It’s not as much, but it’s a good deal of money, for just a tenner!
The Future
As for Jonny & Helen they say they are excited by 2 new opportunities. The first, a new mixed-use, eco-tourism concept in Sussex on 80 acres of land spread across woodlands and water meadows. It is just going through the planning stage but is brimming with opportunities and ecological and environmental projects that will take more and more of their time over the coming years.
Secondly, a most wonderful chance to use their dome building and design experience to the greater good by becoming involved with a new disaster relief shelter charity, providing temporary buildings in disaster zones across the world.
“It’s an amazing, good cause that we feel passionate about supporting.
Imagine taking the enormous benefits we see in guests at the Dome Garden – who are here on holiday, in one of the richest countries in the world – and translating that experience into providing survival shelters for those in the poorest and most extreme environments in the world. It’s a chance to make a real difference to the lives of desperate people across the whole world.
So with a new charity on one hand and another eco-project on the other, we know this is the right thing to do, and the right time to do it”.
PLEASE NOTE: NO FURTHER DETAILS OF THIS COMPETITION WILL BE REVEALED UNTIL THE GLAMPING SHOW ITSELF.
