A GM’s perspective on guest feedback at national scale

Guest feedback is widely available in hospitality. The challenge is not seeing it, but knowing what to do with it, quickly and consistently, across operations at scale. 

Louise Kipling starts her day with a clear focus. 

Across a growing network of 330 properties, thousands of guest experiences are unfolding at the same time. Some are seamless. Others hold small signals that something could be better. Her role is to understand those moments, not in isolation, but as patterns that shape how the business operates. 

As General Manager of Customer Experience at G’day Group, Louise sits at the intersection of guest expectation and operational reality. Feedback is constant, coming from different properties, guest types, and stages of the stay. But the real question has never been volume. It is how to turn that input into something teams can act on, quickly and consistently. 

Earlier on, much of that insight came after the fact. Reports showed what had happened, often in broad terms, but left a gap between understanding and action. For Louise, the real opportunity lay in changing how feedback was used. 

That shift gradually reshaped the approach. Feedback moved from an outcome to a daily input for decisions across properties and teams. By 2025, this took clearer form, with guest-led mid-stay feedback enabling real-time response and greater agency for both guests and teams. 
 
In this model, feedback becomes a tool for improving consistency and decision-making across the network. 

Takeaways

• Guest feedback has shifted from a post-stay metric to an operational system at scale. 

• Mid-stay listening enables teams to resolve issues in real time, not after departure. 

• Themes only become actionable when linked to specific root causes. 

• Consistency comes from clear standards, not uniform experiences. 

• Feedback shapes everything from service recovery to investment decisions. 

Discovery Parks has been gathering and using guest feedback for nearly a decade. How has your approach to listening to guests evolved as the business has grown in scale and complexity? 

As Discovery Parks has grown, guest feedback has moved from being a post-stay measure of satisfaction to a practical operating system across a national network. In the early years, reviews and post-stay surveys helped identify broad areas where standards needed attention, but as the network expanded, high-level themes were no longer enough. The business needed to understand what was driving sentiment by park, stay type, and guest moment, then turn those insights into action quickly.  

That has meant going much deeper into root causes. A broad cleanliness theme, for example, may point to entirely different issues depending on the property, from hygiene concerns in an amenity block to sand and dust being tracked into cabins in a remote destination. The value lies in understanding the real driver rather than the headline label.  

When Discovery implemented guest-led mid-stay feedback in 2025, it gave teams the opportunity to resolve issues such as maintenance concerns or missing items while the guest is still there, reflecting a broader shift toward more structured guest survey practices that support real-time service recovery rather than relying on post-stay reviews. At the same time, sentiment data also helps the business identify larger patterns at scale, such as sleep disruption linked to standby indicator lights across multiple properties.  

We stopped treating guest feedback as a report card and started treating it as an operational system. The goal is not simply to understand what happened yesterday. It is to improve what is happening today.

Louise Kipling, General Manager of Customer Experience, G’day Group

When you review guest feedback and satisfaction results, what helps you move beyond overall scores to understand the real drivers behind guest sentiment?

For Discovery, the most important step is moving beyond headline scores and into the themes, sub-themes, and moments shaping the stay. Overall scores are useful, but they rarely indicate the action that should follow. The business looks at performance through both a park-level and enterprise-level lens, using dashboards that break down trending themes in greater detail.  

That level of precision is what makes feedback actionable. If cleanliness is trending, the real question is whether the issue relates to hygiene, presentation, or an environmental factor. Removing that ambiguity helps teams direct the right response to the right issue, while also making it easier to identify multi-property patterns that may require a broader fix.   

This is especially important in regional and remote destinations, where broad feedback themes can easily be misleading. A cleanliness concern might describe an amenity issue in one park and unsealed-road dust in another. Without root-cause analysis, the same label can point to very different operational realities.  

Can you share an example of a moment when guest feedback clearly highlighted an operational issue or opportunity, and how that insight led to meaningful change on the ground? 

One of the biggest operational changes has been reducing the gap between insight and action. Before Discovery introduced mid-stay pulse checks, even simple issues such as dead batteries in a cabin remote control might only appear in a post-stay review. By the time the comment was read and passed on, another guest may already have experienced the same problem. 

That changed in 2025, when the listening model was redesigned to include guest-led mid-stay surveys and live triage to housekeeping and maintenance teams. Guests can now flag issues while there is still time to fix them, and on-site teams have the visibility and ownership to respond immediately. An additional benefit has been staff morale: teams are no longer reading post-stay comments about issues they could have resolved in minutes if they had known earlier.  

The same principle also applies at network scale. One example involved sleep quality, where Discovery received triple-figure detractor ratings in a single month linked to light pollution from standby indicator lights on televisions, air-conditioning units, wireless internet equipment, and electronic door locks. Because the trend was visible across multiple properties, the business identified the root cause quickly and implemented a network-wide fix by deactivating those lights through master settings. 

Guest insight has also supported proactive planning ahead of peak season. By analysing detractor feedback from previous summers, Discovery identified the cabin type in each park generating the highest volume of negative sentiment and asked park managers to spend a night in those cabins exactly as a guest would. Many of the issues were inexpensive and quick to resolve, but addressing them before peak season removed recurring friction at the point when expectations and operational pressure were highest.   

How does guest feedback influence capital or reinvestment decisions? 

Guest feedback is one of the most valuable inputs into Discovery’s capital and reinvestment planning because it reveals not only whether guests enjoyed their stay, but also how they actually used the accommodation and facilities. Recurring themes are assessed alongside occupancy, yield, and operational data to determine where investment is likely to have the greatest impact for both guests and the business.   

At a practical level, feedback can highlight design improvements that meaningfully affect the stay experience, such as extra kitchen bench space, low-level bathroom lighting for families moving at night, or better-placed power points to support modern device usage. When these needs emerge consistently, they can inform refurbishment standards and future accommodation design.   

Feedback also plays a role in broader investment decisions, from understanding how different guest segments use amenities to shaping site-planning choices such as cabin placement, privacy, and noise mitigation.  

How do you share guest feedback with on-site teams in a way that supports motivation, recognition, and service culture? 

At Discovery, how feedback is shared matters as much as the feedback itself. When teams can see the stories behind the scores, they are better able to understand guest needs and identify practical opportunities to improve. Used in this way, feedback becomes a source of learning and recognition, rather than a performance scorecard. 

The listening model has been designed to capture not only issues to resolve, but also service worth recognising. Guests can share feedback during their stay and highlight great service, while post-stay surveys prompt team-member recognition. Staff mentions are tracked across reviews and surveys and fed into recognition programs, reinforcing a direct link between guest appreciation and employee engagement. 

As a result, staff experience has become one of the strongest positive themes across reviews, showing what happens when feedback is used to support teams rather than judge them. 

At the same time, AI-assisted response tools help managers reply more efficiently and consistently while maintaining quality and context. But the human element remains essential: technology can support the process, but responses still need to reflect the property, the guest experience, and the actions taken. 

Based on your experience, what advice would you give to hospitality leaders who are just starting to build more structured practices around guest insight and listening at scale? 

My first recommendation is to start with why feedback matters, not just what it measures. The strongest programs are not built around scores alone; they are built around understanding guests, recognising teams, and continuously improving the experience. In that model, scores are an outcome rather than the objective.  

Secondly, the priority should be moving from broad themes to root-cause insight. Labels such as cleanliness or noise are a starting point, but the operational value comes from understanding what is actually driving sentiment in each location and for each guest profile.  

I would also advise reducing the lag between insight and action. Post-stay feedback still matters, but some of the most meaningful progress comes from identifying and resolving friction while the guest is still on property. In our case, guest-led mid-stay listening was designed around giving guests control over how and when they interact during their stay, rather than relying on automated prompts. 

Feedback should inform investment as much as operations, with recognition built visibly into the process. When teams experience feedback as something that supports them, rather than judges them after the fact, it changes the culture around listening entirely.

Final thoughts 

Guest feedback is only useful if it actually leads somewhere. What matters is how quickly a comment turns into a decision, and whether teams can act on it while the guest is still on-site. 

That is where the real shift happens, especially at scale. It is not about having more visibility, but about making it easier for teams to respond in the moment and fix issues before they repeat. Because at the end of the day, every piece of feedback is less about what happened, and more about whether it happens again. 

About G’day Group 

G’day Group was founded by Grant Wilckens in 2004 with three caravan parks in Western Australia and has grown into a leader in regional accommodation experiences with more than 330 properties across the country.  

The group operates Discovery, a network of more than 90 owned and operated holiday parks and resorts in regional destinations including Kings Canyon, Rottnest Island, and El Questro. It is also home to G’day Parks, a community of more than 240 independently owned licensed parks, a G’day Rewards loyalty program with more than 245,000 paid members, and Wikicamps, described in the document as Australia’s number one regional travel community.  

The same source states that G’day Group has property assets valued at $2 billion and is on track to become a $2.5 billion business by 2026.