Three brands. Sixty-nine staff. Thirty-eight hours saved every week.
A Queensland operator running multiple brands had good data trapped behind bad systems. Within a business year they were running their busiest year on record, and exceeding every revenue budget.
- 38 hrs
- Saved every week
- $30K
- Staffing cost avoided / yr
- 10x
- Growth in review volume
Inside Eco Camp Group
Eco Camp Group runs six brands across Queensland, from river eco safaris and glamping to a bar and a brewery. Dan Gregory leads operations, with a team of three managing guide rosters, vehicle capacity and trade partner connectivity while a reservations team fields a constant stream of calls, emails and booking changes across every brand at once.
At peak that is 144 tour guests a day and up to 400 accommodation bookings arriving from direct channels and trade partners alike, with a guest services team of eight running three to five person shifts to keep it moving.
- Operator
- Eco Camp GroupSix brands under one roof
- Founded
- 2017
- Headcount
- 69 staffReservations, ops and marketing
- Daily volume
- 144 tour guestsPlus up to 400 accommodation bookings a day
- Geography
- Queensland, AU
- Booking stack
- Multi-platformPlus trade partner connectivity
Good business. Disconnected systems.
Five leaks, none of them caused by a lack of demand.
- 01Data quality
Missing and inaccurate booking data
Trade bookings arrived without phone numbers or pickup points, and with the wrong transport option selected. Staff chased and corrected every record by hand before each departure.
Every booking checked by hand
- 02Conversion
After-hours enquiries going unanswered
The office ran 8am to 5pm. Guests in Europe and Asia could not reach the team, and bookings that needed one simple answer often never converted.
International guests locked out
- 03Reputation
Reviews left unanswered for weeks
Logging into separate Google accounts for each brand made review management cumbersome. One-star reviews were not spotted until it was too late to act.
One-star reviews caught too late
- 04Reporting
No unified performance view
Revenue, bookings and marketing data lived across five to seven disconnected systems. Any business overview needed manual assembly, every time.
5 to 7 systems stitched by hand
- 05Operations
Unnecessary rostering costs
Inaccurate transport selections caused a second bus and driver to be rostered, only for the extra guests to turn up in their own cars.
Buses rostered against bad data
Fourteen times the daily volume, handled in hours.
"During cyclone Alfred we had to cancel around 10 days of bookings. We do not have the resources to contact thousands of guests individually. Normally we deal with 800 to 1000 tour guests and 1500 accommodation guests a week, but when you dump that many cancelled guests on you, how do you manage that?"
- ~1,000
- Guests in one mass cancellation
- 10 days
- Of bookings invalidated
- 14x
- Normal daily volume, cleared in hours
The staff they hired, and what each one took over
Eco Camp Group came through a peer recommendation: built by an experienced operator, for this industry specifically. Three capabilities did the heavy lifting.
An answer at 2am, in any language
Inbound call volume dropped within days of going live. Guests self-answer pickup, lunch and access questions, and most chats land between 10pm and 3am, capturing international guests who previously had no way of getting an answer in time.
"A lot of guests are simply asking the chatbot, and you see them converting to bookings."
Missing data chased automatically
Between 30 and 50 percent of a full role used to be chasing guests and trade partners for incomplete bookings. Automated data chasing replaced it entirely, and incorrect transport selections, a recurring cost, have not happened once since activation.
"That has not happened since we turned on the missing fields feature. Not once."
Reviews answered the same day
Reviews across every brand now get bespoke, drafted responses within 12 to 24 hours. One-star alerts arrive fast enough to speak to a guest who is still on site, and several of those conversations have ended with the review being removed.
"We can find them, talk to them on site, and the one-star review gets removed because they feel heard."
What changed, in numbers
"We have reached every target and exceeded every budget since we introduced this, and we are certain it has played a part in that, especially for our Everglades operation, which is the biggest user of the platform."
What Dan tells other operators
On whether it is worth it
"It is a game changer. You will have way better control over your business and its data, your customers, and you will take costs out of your business."
On onboarding
"It kind of forced us to get our own house in order. We had been deferring it for two years and paying the price. It gave us a kick and helped us across the line."
Advice for new customers
"Start with the chatbot. It teaches you, by looking at the responses, how out of date your website data is. Bad data creates bad answers, and it forced us to review everything."
In plain language
"A portal that lets you understand your business better and serve your customers better. As long as you have customers and data, it is going to make you better at what you are doing."
Keep reading
See the Revenue You're Leaving on the Table
Read-only connection to your booking system. Within a few days you get back a plain report on your unsold seats, weekday demand pattern and lead-time curve. Nothing installed, nothing changed, nothing to uninstall.
- Seats that went out empty in the last 90 days, by product and departure
- Where your weekday demand actually sits versus where you're pricing it
- How far out guests book, so you know when a seat is really lost
- Which of the five leaks is costing you the most bookings