The situation

A 10-person tourism operator on the Coffs Coast ran accommodation and a daily guided tour, processing around 200 bookings a month during peak season. The business had a strong reputation locally, but online reviews were sparse: an average of eight Google reviews a month, most left voluntarily by guests who had already decided to say something. Confirmation emails were written manually by the operations manager, arrival reminders were sent when someone remembered, and review requests happened only when a team member happened to think of it. The opportunity cost was substantial. Coffs Harbour tourism is heavily influenced by recent reviews, and new visitors arriving on the Pacific Coast highway typically compare operators on their phones before booking.

The flow we built

A booking lifecycle flow built on Make.com listens for confirmed bookings in Resly and runs five steps:

  • Immediately on booking confirmation, a welcome email goes to the lead booker with their itinerary and optional add-ons (guided tours, airport transfers, hire equipment).
  • Two days before arrival, an SMS confirms check-in details and the day's weather forecast for the Coffs region.
  • The morning after checkout, a short email goes to the lead booker with a direct link to the business's Google Reviews page. The email addresses the guest by name and references their stay dates.
  • If the guest gives a satisfaction score below four out of five in a one-question survey, the review request is routed privately to the operations manager instead of going to Google. The manager can follow up before any negative sentiment reaches a public forum.
  • All contact events are logged in a Google Sheet for monthly review.

The platforms

Resly as the booking and property management system. Make.com for the automation logic, webhook listening, and conditional routing. Twilio for SMS. Mailchimp for the email sequences. The setup runs on a Professional Bot Care plan, so when Resly released an update to their webhook payload format the monitoring picked up the schema change and the flow was updated before any guest received a broken email.

The results

In the three months following deployment, monthly Google reviews rose from an average of eight to 32. The operator did not change anything about the guest experience. The shift was purely in timing: a personalised request arriving the morning after checkout, when the stay is fresh, converts far better than an ask made days later or not at all. The upsell email added a measurable lift to tour bookings: the tour fill rate in the two months after launch was 12 percent higher than the same period the previous year. The operations manager recovered around six hours a month that had previously gone to manually writing confirmation emails.

What this could look like for your tourism business

If your business handles accommodation, tours, or experiences anywhere on the Mid North Coast or Northern Tablelands, a booking lifecycle flow like this one can run continuously across every guest without adding headcount. Small business automation in Coffs Harbour is a regular part of what we do for regional tourism operators.