Melinda's Story.

Founder Melinda Beckett-Hughes reveals her personal journey to the quiet bliss of Antalya – and how her experience shapes and informs the appeal and success of

Ayuda Retreats.

Ayuda was created by Melinda Beckett-Hughes from a lifetime of helping people navigate change — and from her own experience of beginning again.

For more than four decades, I have worked with people, businesses and leaders at important turning points in their lives.

My career has taken me through executive search, organisational development, counselling psychology, leadership coaching and senior-level business advisory work. I have supported executives through demanding professional transitions, coached at PLC board level and built businesses of my own.



But my understanding of change has never come from professional experience alone.

In 2014, after my children had grown up and left home, I opened Ayuda House, a seven-bedroom boutique B&B in Cheshire. It became much more than a business. It was a place of warmth, conversation and connection — and the beginning of my vision for creating environments in which people could step away from everyday pressures and find a clearer way forward.

Then life changed dramatically.

A succession of personal, financial and professional crises brought the world I had known to an end. I experienced profound loss, bereavement, serious illness and the collapse of plans into which I had invested almost everything.

Some of those experiences were deeply painful. They also taught me that rebuilding a life is rarely a simple or orderly process. It requires courage, acceptance, faith, forgiveness and the willingness to begin again — sometimes more than once.

In 2020, I came to Antalya intending to create a new retreat home. I was captivated by the natural beauty, history and warmth of this part of Türkiye and chose to make it my home.

The journey that followed was far more difficult than I could have imagined. My original plans for the retreat business were derailed, and I faced further personal and financial setbacks, including a life-threatening medical emergency.

Yet Antalya also became the place where I slowly rebuilt.

Through prayer, reflection, wise counsel, friendship and time, I found a deeper sense of balance and wellbeing than I had known before. Not because every problem disappeared, but because I learned to live differently within uncertainty.

Alongside rebuilding my personal life, I returned to the international business world, helped establish a gold and commodities trading business in Dubai, and began reshaping Ayuda for a new chapter.

Today, Ayuda brings together the different strands of my life and work.

Ayuda Retreats offers private, individually designed experiences in Antalya for people navigating change, seeking renewal or combining time away with carefully coordinated health and wellbeing services.

Personal Counsel offers confidential, independent perspective to individuals, families and their advisers when life, relationships or important decisions have become complex.

I do not claim to have every answer, nor to have reached some state of perfect wholeness. What I bring is experience, perspective, psychological insight, commercial understanding and the ability to see how the different parts of a person’s life fit together.

I know what it is to lose direction, to face circumstances I did not choose and to rebuild when the original plan was no longer possible.

I also know that a difficult chapter does not have to become the end of the story.

Today, I feel more grounded, balanced and purposeful than at any previous stage of my life. Ayuda — meaning “help” — is how I use everything I have learned to help others find clarity, possibility and their own way forward.

Have Fun • Make Money • Create Change • Do Good

Melinda Beckett-Hughes

A lifetime of experience