Center Parcs CMO's Philosophy For Success

When she joined Center Parcs as CMO last March, Sara Holt arrived with a relentless and uncompromising drive to elevate the brand and drive business growth. Ferociously sharp, she is focused on delivering results, never letting the numbers dip.

She joined as the resorts were growing in popularity, with a remit to build on this success.

Despite suffering during Covid-19, Center Parcs has recovered impressively. The business welcomed 2.4 million guests, and has posted high occupancy rates of 97.3 per cent and its strongest-ever guest satisfaction scores. Its revenue was £734.8m in 2025 (up from £704.1m in 2024).

Holt’s latest endeavour is to build a more cohesive brand identity, supported by a marketing plan shaped around this success. This has been delivered via a new campaign, made in partnership with Neverland agency, entitled ‘Bubbles’. The campaign shows a bubble floating serenely around natural landscapes such as forests, lakes and cabins.

The idea is based around guest insights that Center Parcs is a place that reconnects them with what matters most. The aim of the work is to showcase the brand’s new positioning: “We build better worlds”.

At the same time, Center Parcs has expanded its marketing team with three new senior appointments, bringing in Sarah Vickery, Stuart O’Neill, and Gillian Blair to lead customer experience, creative and media planning respectively.

Pinpoint Precision

“I never sacrificed my desire to work on world-class brands,” Holt explains. And her drive is certainly clear in her stellar track record - which spans stints at the BBC, marketing the likes of Capital FM, Top Gear, Doctor Who and BBC Earth, followed by a role as digital marketing officer at Lego, and then Merlin Entertainments where she became group marketing and sales director for the UK and Europe (this including working at Italy's popular Merlin-owned resort Gardaland, which attracts 3 million visitors annually).

In 2021, she chaired a conglomerate of businesses and organisations to develop the post Covid-19 lockdowns ‘Let’s do London’ campaign, which became the biggest domestic tourism push the capital had ever seen.

She developed her focus while studying philosophy at the University of Durham and fine-tuned her communication skills on the university’s debating society. While Holt initially considered becoming a barrister - “I’m quite good at arguing”, she says - when Saatchi & Saatchi turned up at the University during her final year, she was intrigued.

"I'd never ever thought about marketing or advertising. I didn't even know what those jobs were when I was younger." Holt explains.

"There was lots of things like management consultancy, banking, accounting... I didn't want to do any of those things so I thought ‘I'm going to go off and work in adland,’" she continues.

She started off at Ogilvy and then St Luke's, before moving brand-side.

'This is just the beginning'

Holt explains that Center Parcs appealed to her because of her colleagues and its visiting numbers - adding that she was excited about the challenges ahead and the opportunities to make a real difference.

“What I hadn’t realised until I was approached for the role was how, because Center Parcs had always been full, they hadn’t done a lot to tell their unique brand story — and that they had a lot to do in terms of personalisation with their digital journey and customer experience,” Holt adds.

The latest campaign is a ten-year endeavour shaped around real brand transformation. "What you’re seeing now is the very first work, but there will be epic work that comes out of this partnership. It’s going to be one of the most famous partnerships in our industry, and this is just the beginning," Holt says.

She adds that there will be a lot of focus on localised messaging ahead of a new Center Parcs village opening in Scotland. Much of this will be through out-of-home activity focusing on how the business is contributing in local areas.

This narrative – positioning Center Parcs as a space for connection and high‑quality leisure with the people who matter – is articulated through the bubbles featured in the campaign. Those conceptualise the idea that Center Parcs is an oasis in which families can spend time close to the people that they love the most

This is also being amplified through earned influencer partnerships on TikTok and YouTube.

Holt says much of the business’s recent focus has been on customer experience and organising its tech stack. New assets have been rolled out across the website, and the brand is working to attract younger audiences – something that its adoption of TikTok is designed to support.

And it is precisely Holt's focus on combining a cohesive narrative with KPIs that drive tangible performance which defines her leadership prowess.

"Leadership, to me, is about connecting strategy with execution, giving people clear direction, and empowering them to deliver results while being creative and bold," she emphasises.

The World Of Marketing According to Sara Holt

What excites you most about being a marketer?

Whether it's the BBC, Lego, Merlin or Center Parcs, it's about building something world class, creating emotional connections with people and doing work that genuinely matters.

Elevating the brand to drive significant business growth is what excites me, particularly when it involves fixing that over the long term rather than just fixing something that’s broken.

I was drawn to Center Parcs because it’s both a really, really successful business already, but it had tremendous potential to be even more so and drive significant business growth. And when you put those two things together, that’s a really potent combination for any big CMO looking for a role, particularly at this time.

What frustrates you most about being a marketer?

The fact that marketing is too often seen as a cost centre rather than something which has a positive return on investment.

Part of this is because there are far too many CMOs who are not financially literate. Rather than being frustrated, it's our job as marketers to explain the metrics and the return on investment.

What do you look for in agency partnerships?

I already had the brief that we needed to transform our brand and elevate it to drive significant business growth, but there was also a need to do a peak trading campaign, and getting those things right together was really the brief.

What appealed to me about Neverland [the current creative agency] was that they could do both - the brand strategy and the creative. There’s the brand strategy part, working all the way through defining our brand purpose and values, and then there’s the creative and advertising part. They were with me end-to-end, from shaping the strategy through to bringing it to life in the work. That’s what I look for in an agency partner.

What achievements are you most proud of as a marketer?

Working on great British heritage brands and internationally amazing brands like Gardaland in Italy, which is the biggest theme park in Italy.

Before that, I was at Lego and the BBC… If I’ve ever worked on something that seemed smaller, it’s become much bigger afterwards

What's been your boldest creative play?

‘Let’s Do London’ – a project of the tourism recovery group that I led post‑Covid‑19 [in my capacity as chair of the London Tourism Recovery Board Marketing Directors group.] We shifted demand internationally and helped save frontline jobs.