What you need to know:

• Privately owned Australian holiday park operator giant, G’Day Group, has unveiled newly re-platformed mobile app and website offerings across its Discovery Parks, G’Day and WikiCamps offerings.
• With 78% of revenue coming from mobile app-based bookings, taking a mobile-first approach and boldly adopting microservices and Flutter programming languages was critical for CMO, Lahnee White – but it meant convincing the board to abandon existing progress around overhauling its outdated, spaghetti technology stack.
• Rethinking the mobile and digital experience for customers is the latest in its multimillion-dollar tech and digital transformation effort that included $10m in spend in FY23/24.
• It also comes after several years of spending $100m+ per annum on building out the property portfolio as well as digital products including the acquisition of WikiCamps.
• In the first month, mobile app conversions were up 5%, while website bookings are up between 39% per month.

Beefing up investment to improve G’Day Group’s mobile app offerings is a no-brainer for CMO and business manager for the group’s G’Day booking engine, Lahnee White. Mobile users might currently represent just under 15 per cent of the total customer base, but they’re worth nearly 20 times more than customers buying via the Web, at 78 per cent of total revenues. In addition, two-thirds of purchasers come from the app, demonstrating app users are far more likely to convert compared to mobile web visitors.

But when White landed at the group two-and-a-half years ago, she quickly realised the digital and technology transformation underway was unlikely to achieve the kind of easier connection, or digital or mobile self-service customisation customers should expect of a holiday park giant. Nor would it deliver the simplified back-end G’Day needed to keep up with future customer demands through features, functions, customisation and personalisation.

“When our CTO left, I took on a bit more digital responsibility and discovered the trajectory we were on was probably not going to get us to where we needed to be,” White tells Mi3.  

“I needed to engage our board and CEO to say hey, I know we’ve invested a lot of money and were going in this direction, but I’m going to ask we stop, and head in this direction, and look at how we simplify how we’re thinking about tech into the future. It was a bold moment in time: To front up to a board and say let’s write off a large sum of money. But they got on board.”

The holiday opportunity at hand

G’Day Group, a caravan and holiday park operator 95 per cent owned by Australian Retirement Trust, has 90 owned and operated businesses under its Discovery Park brand, plus either owns or supports 350 independently owned holiday parks via its G’Day digital booking platform, marketing, and distribution engine. It also owns the 700,000-acre wilderness park, El Questro, based in the Kimberley region, and bought Australia’s number one paid travel app in the app store with 1 million+ users, WikiCamps, a couple of years ago. In all, group assets have been valued at $2bn, and in the financial year to 30 June 2024, the group generated a 15 per cent increase in annual revenue to $397.3 million.

“We were on a legacy stack and already looking to re-platform, in part because some pieces were no longer supported,” White says, noting multiple, disconnected instances of Xamarin code behind its mobile apps as an example. “But over the last couple of years, we also acquired digital businesses, and became more of a multi-channel tourism business. As we made the shift from growing on property, to looking at customer experience end-to-end, it gave us the moment in time to say, let’s think about the digital demands of our customers and how we make it easier to connect with our brands.”

Knowing the right digital and tech is so crucial to scale and customer satisfaction, White took on the task of convincing the board and executive to switch tack. Before the rethink, things “looked like spaghetti on an architectural map”.

“We had a lot of logic sitting in the front end, meaning when we wanted to change anything, it was always hard coded and very complicated. The back end was a mess of things plugged in over time.”

What G’Day Group has done to be mobile-first

Over the last 18 months, the group has replatformed customer-facing apps on a microservices approach. This sees it pulling all logic out of the front end – “which was an error of time”, argues White – and adopting plug-and-play microservices that enable G’Day to deliver tech faster than it has ever done before when it comes to new features and functionality.

There has been some contention in the IT world that microservices can lead to even more distributed systems and therefore less cohesive approaches compared with traditional and planned architecture. But as Forrester analysts put it in a 2022 report, microservices provide application modularity and deployment flexibility, thereby potentially offering more agility as well as rapid response to both digital disruption and specific business needs.

In G’Day’s case, a single platform and code base coupled with pre-built microservices for things like bookings and ancillary services means it’s only up to 20 per cent extra effort to build functionality for one brand’s mobile app and convert it to another, says White.  

The group also settled on a relatively new software code base for these efforts: Flutter. “That was probably a brave decision as it’s relatively new tech, and there’s not a lot of documentation,” comments White. “Making sure we have teams in place to learn and grow while developing was a big step for us as well.”

Due diligence and research indicating Flutter was better for mobile apps was critical in getting over the line. Given the bulk of revenue is coming via the mobile app in the G’Day business, and there’s been a 43 per cent increase in downloads over the last 12 months (to more than 360,000 today), plus a 20 per cent lift in bookings via the app, mobile-first was a must for White.

“The bigger question was if it would be good enough for web,” she continues. “We spoke to other providers that had been on that journey – someone here had been working at TAB when they were on that journey – so it was about trying to build confidence off the back of those who were a bit ahead of us.”

But even before this, the group engaged KPMG to help it understand customer needs. “KPMG was mainly validation for us – we’re not doing anything crazy different here. People have been going on holidays forever, and we had enough people feeding into it as well on things we’d been waiting to do, as we hadn’t invested in tech for the last couple of years,” says White.

“If I think about G’Day Parks for example, we did some work around what digital leadership looks like globally, what’s best practice in digital versus our category, then a lot of prototyping around how to design the app. We then engaged customers to test and validate our thinking. We used that to have the conversations with the board, which was more valuable than just our intuition. It gave us credibility by having global best practice; credibility with customers – this is what they told us and we’ve asked them. It also painted the picture as well. Not everyone on the board is digitally native, so using visuals and demonstrations brought it to life and got them engaged in what we were trying to create for customers.”

According to White, G’Day has the largest customer database in the category, with 1.7 million usable customer records, including 240,000 members in its G’Day rewards program.

“We looked at different segments we know are our core growth segments – families, nomads [over 65s], middies [people going away without kids]. Their needs are slightly different and we’re trying to find commonality versus doing something distinctive to meet their needs,” she explains.  

“But the common customer need is people want to be inspired when they’re looking for a holiday; when they’re ready to book, they want it to be easy and effortless. Particularly for our G’Day Parks, we have to think about how we extend that seamless, digital experience through the sites as well. Beyond booking in and getting there, it’s therefore thinking about the experiences we provide – we have magicians coming in, the sausage sizzle is on, food trucks are coming. How can we make that readily available in our platforms so customers have that in their pocket?”

Nevertheless, the most important and first priority was a streamlined and efficient process for guest bookings. White notes the replatform has improved app load times by 82 per cent.

“We also looked at when you arrive… What we are exploring at the moment is having the boom gate code you can scan as you drive in; and also when you get to your cabin you can just scan the door. If you don’t want to come into reception, you don’t have to. You can just get in, unload the kids and start the holiday,” White says.

Another Q1, 2025 use case aim is group bookings enabling customers to book together to ensure they get locations close to each other onsite.

Measures of success

G’Day group’s replatformed play went live between September and November last year. White points to the fact 90 per cent of customers organically migrated to the new G’Day app within seven days of its launch as an early indicator of interest.

“It’s particularly interesting as we’re a low-frequency category – the fact people were engaged enough to get involved and do that was great,” she says.

Within its first month, the group also saw a 5 per cent increase in conversion rates through the G’Day mobile app based on the same time last year. “We tried to strip out as much other activity and noise, so we feel confident that 5 per cent is directly related to the tech update,” White says.

The website is harder to quantify and taking more time to normalise, but conversions were up between 3 – 9 per cent at time of publication.

Meanwhile, internal change management to celebrate even the smallest of wins across the different development, digital, tech and operational staff involved in the tech overhaul, as well as training onsite staff, have been crucial to getting things up and off the ground.

“A big part has been training our team on the ground in parks so when customers come in, they can start educating and orientating them around digital self-service, so they don’t have to call every time,” White says.

Balancing digital channel share of revenue with monthly Net Promoter Score reporting is also vital for White and the operational team to ensure they don’t push people too hard into digital only to find them having negative experiences.

White admits there’s barely any personalisation yet in the digital offerings, and her sights for the next 18 months are firmly set on harnessing customer data. G’Day Group is scoping out a customer data platform (CDP) which White hopes to have live by mid-year, and has created a data lake where all customer data has been centralised. The group invested in Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud 18 months ago and has begun tapping the vendor’s Einstein AI capabilities to help with digital advertising, tailored CRM campaigns and email communications.

“In 12 months’ time, I’d like to think if our strategy follows through, that we’ll have sophisticated tracking on the site to enable us to deliver really personalised platform messaging linking through to our CRM,” she says.  

“We’re also exploring customisation of our platform – personalisation we’ll do automatically for you; customisation is where I’m a cabin booker, and when I open the app I get a cabin booking experience. That’s very different to a 21-foot caravan and the things I think about and book. So it’s how we think about those different experiences for customers.

“There’s commonality and things everyone wants and drive business, which is of value too. But you also want to make sure you’re acutely aware of where your revenue is coming from as you may need to prioritise that as well.”

Through it all, White says her big learning as a CMO is the power of speaking the language of technology.

“We speak as an industry a lot about marketing being able to ‘speak finance’… I 100 per cent agree and I’m doing my applied finance course at the moment to elevate my knowledge there. But I think what we don’t talk often enough about is being a marketing technologist,” White says.

“Technology is a fundamental way in which we deliver customer experience across pretty much any category. The more we can be engaged with and fluent in the narrative that is tech, and the more we have those good conversations with developers or the CTO, the better outcomes we’re going to get for customers.”