A woman scorned? Take a healing holiday at the Heartbreak Hotel

A hotel in the British countryside is looking to take care of a specific clientele: romantically traumatised women. The Heartbreak Hotel offers three-day “transformational therapy” retreats specifically for, as its website says, “women whose hearts have been trampled on by deceitful partners”.

“If you’ve been cheated on ... if your relationship has crumbled ... if you’re in pain, this is the hotel for you.”

Over three days on set dates, groups of six to eight women tackle topics such as transforming their anger into agency, making sense of pain and identifying their “love language” and attachment style. The retreat also promises lessons in how to spot narcissists and cheaters so participants can “avoid them forever” and learn how to meet their own “core love needs”.

The brains behind the operation are two friends, Alice Haddon and Ruth Field, who met at university more than 25 years ago. Private heartbreaks connected them on the deepest level, they say, and they’ve been “talking about heartbreak ever since”, making their collaboration on the Heartbreak Hotel a natural one.

Haddon, a counselling psychologist and lecturer, says the programme she developed for the hotel is informed by years of listening to stories of heartbreak and loss of many different kinds.

She also built the retreat around the idea that short term intensive therapy could be more immediately beneficial and empowering to distressed women than one-hour weekly therapy sessions over the long term. The retreats are a sort of crash course in recovery. 

And they are priced accordingly: the cost is an eye-watering £2,500 (about R49,897) per retreat, but this is justified as being about the same price as seeing a therapist weekly for six months. Considering the additions of food, accommodation, walks on the beach and “fireside care”, “what you’re getting is a therapeutic bargain”, the website says. 

Field is an author, speaker and coach who uses humour as a tool to inspire. Her first self-help book titled Run Fat Bitch Run (Sphere, 2011), became an international best-seller. 

The hotel is set in a converted barn near the charming village of Gresham in North Norfolk in the east of England. When not operating as The Heartbreak Hotel, it’s the award-winning Chaucer Barn — ironically a wedding venue which The Independent newspaper rated as the UK’s sixth best. 

The retreats are run by women and only women guests are allowed — though all sexual orientations are permitted. Applicants have to fill out a form on which they are asked to describe their specific heartache to ensure that women of similar experiences are brought together. 

In addition to group therapy and workshops, guests can expect a seasonal menu prepared by the in-house chef, roaring fires, cosy sofas, comfy beds, blankets, hot water bottles, cups of tea on tap and daily trips to the beach “to release that stress and blow away the heartbreak cobwebs”.