Woikoski Feeling provides accommodation, conference, event and horse services as well as beauty and well-being experiences. We operate in Mäntyharju, Kouvola, Saariselkä, Luosto and Ivalo.

Our quality policy

• Our travel business, Woikoski Feeling, wants to guarantee highquality services and unique experiences to its customers in a high-class milieu.
• To ensure the continuous development and the quality of the services we provide, our operations are examined and developed through determined quality work and control.

Our environmental policy

• In the experiences we provide to our customers, we emphasize the local nature and food made with ingredients produced by local producers. We recognize our own environmental responsibilities and all our values and actions are in line with our responsibilities.
• We are committed to sustainable development. We constantly aim to develop our operations in order to reduce our environmental footprint while providing highclass services and experiences to our customers.
• With our actions, we support and promote the ecological diversity of our local nature. All the forest we own is sustainably managed and parts of our forests are attached to the Repovesi nature reserve area in order to promote nature tourism.
• We adhere to all the laws, regulations and instructions provided by the authorities.

We have received the ISO 9001 quality certificate in May 2019. Woikoski Feeling is amongst the first to receive the certificate in tourism and travel business. The WHD equestrian center is the first in Finland to receive the same certificate. We have also received the ISO 14001 environmental certificate in June 2020.

At Woikoski Feeling, we see responsibility as a guideline that helps us develop our business into the right direction. We want to continuously develop our operations to be socioculturally, economically and ecologically more responsible and sustainable.

Sociocultural and economical responsibility

At Woikoski Feeling, we have a long tradition of partaking in the sociocultural and economical development of the Kymenlaakso and Southern Savonia regions. The grounds in which our WHD Gård resort is located today was originally founded for these exact reasons.

The WHD Gård estate has been owned by Oy Woikoski Ab since the 1930s. It used to be the company’s test farm, in which different kinds of farming methods and technologies were tested and developed. At the time, this kind of work was seen as the sociocultural and economical responsibility of big industrial companies towards their local communities, as the smaller farmers didn’t have the recourses to do so.

Almost a century later, the same principles of sociocultural and economical responsibility still apply at Woikoski Feeling. We employ local people trough our travel, restaurant and horse services. In addition to our own employees, we provide work through our numerous subcontractors.

The Kirjokivi Manor also has a special role for us in the preservation of the local cultural heritage. Located by the lake Tihvet, the manor is designed by the famous Eliel Saarinen and built by Rudolf Elving, the founder of Voikkaa paper mill. The manor, built in the late 1890s, is an important piece of the local cultural heritage. The badly deteriorated manor was renovated with respect to it’s heritage, and after extensive renovation, the manor was re-opened for visitors in 2013. Today it’s restaurant and accommodation services serve guests from all over Finland.

As well as utilizing local service providers in our nature and well-being activities, local producers also provide the bulk of the ingredients used in our three restaurants Hilupilttuu, Juureskellari and Kirjokivi Manor. These ingredients include the meat, fish, grains and others. In addition, we grow products such as fruits and berries in our own gardens and greenhouses. In our horse services, we try to develop the field by providing the best services in Finland with advanced training and rehab methods.

The safety of our operations is also a key part of our sociocultural responsibility. We design our activities and events to be as safe as possible for the visitors as well as for our staff. This is done according to the guidance from the local authorities and with respect to the law and all other relevant guidelines. During the ongoing COVID-19 situation, we have paid special attention to planning our activities and events, and undertook precautionary measures recommended by the local officials if needed.

Ecological responsibility

As we operate partly in the Kouvola region located in Kymenlaakso and partly in the Mäntyharju region located in Southern Savonia, we are positioned in the middle of the most beautiful Finnish nature. This demands special attention to ecological responsibility. Protecting the ecological diversity of the local nature is in the DNA of our business, since most of the activities we provide relate directly to the surrounding nature. Without the well-being of the nature, there wouldn’t be any business. Therefore for us, ecological responsibility is an attraction as much as it is an intrinsic value in everything we do.

We participate in nature preservation and carrying our ecological responsibility in many ways. One of the ways is the Woikoski Feeling Nature Sanctuary -nature reserve, which is located in the northwestern part of the Repovesi national park. The reserve was founded in 2016 and covers some 240 hectares of conserved forest. In addition, Oy Woikoski Ab founded the Dr Bertil Palmberg’s nature reserve in 2006 which covers some 50 hectares of conserved forest in same the Repovesi region. Another 10-hectare islet is also in the process of reservation in Repovesi by Oy Woikoski Ab. In all, the protected areas cover about 10% of the whole Repovesi nature reserve area.

The Woikoski Feeling area itself, including the WHD Gård estate area and the Kirjokivi Manor area cover some 400 hectares of land within which most of our activities are held. The activities range from hiking trails, hunting and car off-roading to frisbee golf. Most of the activities are located in the surrounding woods. All of the Woikoski Feeling’s woods are PEFC certified. The PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification) contributes to forestry that is ecologically, socially and economically sustainable.

All our actions regarding ecological responsibility aim to the well-being of our local environment and nature. With the nature reserves we want to contribute to the preservation of the pristine Finnish nature. In the woods used for our activities, we want to ensure that any excessive wear doesn’t occur. This means the regular maintenance of the trails and sufficient amount of wastebaskets, for example.

Certified quality

The factors mentioned above form the principles and case examples of our actions to continuously develop the responsibility of our business and operations. We monitor our overall responsibility through our yearly in-house audits done by Oy Woikoski Ab and external audits done by Kiwa Inspecta. We also audit all our external service providers annually.

Thanks to these actions and audits, we have received ISO9001 and ISO14001 certificates that confirm the standards of our operations. The aim of the certificates is the continuous development, quality and uniformity of the company’s operations, customer satisfaction and monitoring of the different kinds of environmental effects related to the business. With the ISO9001 certification we have ensured that our products and services fullfil the needs of customers and different stakeholders alike. The ISO14001 certification ensures that our processes are continuously monitored and developed in respect of the essential environmental aspects.