hotelThe Hotel Inspector · Season 14, Episode 2 · Aired June 12, 2018
Yeoldon House Hotel
Bideford, England
Open. The rescue stuck and it continues to operate.
What happened after
Award-winning-restaurant hotel on the banks of the River Torridge; evidence via multiple aggregator mirrors, no independently confirmed official domain.
What happened on the show
Retired couple John and Ilona had spent thousands on a ten-bedroom hotel in Bideford, but occupancy sat below ten per cent when Alex Polizzi arrived in series 14, and she came with a plan. That occupancy figure is the whole case in a number: a hotel almost entirely empty despite significant money spent, which points to a marketing and positioning failure rather than a quality one. Polizzi's task was to work out why a property the couple had invested in so heavily was drawing almost no guests, and to give a retired pair, whose savings were tied up in the venture, a route to the bookings they needed before the empty rooms sank them. John and Ilona's near-empty hotel, with occupancy in single figures, aired in June 2018 before the Devon property lifted itself into a going concern.
After the cameras left
Yeoldon House is still trading, an award-winning-restaurant hotel on the banks of the River Torridge at Northam near Bideford. Its listings appear consistently and strongly across multiple booking aggregators as of 2026, with high review scores, though no standalone official site was independently confirmed, so the open status is held at medium confidence. The near-empty hotel Polizzi found, with occupancy in single figures, appears to have lifted itself into a going concern in the years since, its restaurant now a notable draw for the Devon property John and Ilona had staked their savings on.
Sources
Confidence: medium. Last checked 2026-07-19.