How three holiday parks in Regional Victoria more than doubled direct bookings with RoomStay
Spanning the Victorian High Country, South Gippsland's rainforest and the shores of Lake Tyers, Saltwater's holiday parks draw guests to some of Victoria's most distinct landscapes. Facing rising OTA dependence and a direct channel that wasn't converting, the group turned to RoomStay to take back control of its revenue.
Overview
Saltwater Hotels & Resorts is a second-generation, family-owned Australian accommodation group based in Gippsland. It manages more than 30 properties across five states, from alpine retreats to beachfront holiday parks. Luke Percival leads operations across the group's portfolio, spanning holiday parks, hotels and resorts.
Three regional holiday parks sit at the centre of this case study. Mingling Waters on the Nowa Nowa arm of Lake Tyers, Omeo Holiday Park in the Victorian High Country, and Tarra Valley Retreat in South Gippsland's rainforest. All three run on the RMS Property Management System, and all three had a “Book Now” button on their websites feeding into the RMS native booking engine.
The button stayed. The website stayed. The audience stayed. In 2025, the engine behind the button changed to RoomStay, and the numbers tell the rest of the story.
Customer Case
How a Holiday Park in the Daintree Drove a 434% Spike in Direct Revenues with RoomStay
Tucked away in the lush rainforest of the Daintree, this holiday park offers a peaceful escape into nature. Facing low direct bookings and heavy reliance on OTAs, the park turned to RoomStay to improve performance and take back control of its revenue.
Challenge
Saltwater's holiday parks were facing the familiar set of pressures that sit across the independent park sector.
Rising OTA dependence, a booking experience that wasn't converting, and no easy way to lift direct revenue across a multi-property portfolio.
15.8% Of Mingling Waters' revenue was going to Booking.com in 2024
Booking.com, Expedia, and G'day Parks were reliable sources of volume, but every booking carried commission. At Mingling Waters alone, Booking.com was taking nearly 16% of total property revenue. That money wasn't going back into the park.
An underperforming incumbent PMS booking engine
Both properties were running entirely on the RMS native "Book Now" engine. It was functional, but it wasn't driving the direct conversions the group needed. Guests were landing on the site and drifting off to OTAs to complete the purchase.
Three properties, no consistent guest experience
With three parks running the same PMS but different on-site teams, Saltwater needed a direct booking layer that could roll out across all three without custom work, match each property's brand, and give guests the same fast, clear booking path wherever they were on the group's sites.
Solution
RoomStay for Holiday Parks
Rather than redesigning the websites or running an OTA push (which would mean ceding even more revenue to commissions), the group made one targeted change. The “Book Now” button on each property's site was pointed at the RoomStay’s high converting Booking Engine instead of the RMS’ underperforming native engine. Everything upstream of that button stayed the same, which makes the comparison unusually clean. Same audience, same site, same entry point, different engine.
RoomStay booking engine deployed across all three parks
RoomStay replaced the RMS native booking engine as the direct booking layer on Mingling Waters, Omeo, and Tarra Valley. Guests clicking “Book Now” now landed on a mobile-first, high converting booking flow built for holiday park inventory, with powered sites, unpowered sites, cottages, bunkhouses, and glamping all bookable in the same path.
Live, two-way integration with RMS
RoomStay syncs rates, availability, and rules with RMS in real time, so the front desk, OTAs, and the direct channel never drift apart. No double bookings, no overnight batch updates, no stale pricing.
One rollout, three properties, group-wide reporting
Because all three parks sit on RMS and share Saltwater's operational oversight, the group can now see direct booking performance by property and at a portfolio level. Luke's team can compare how RoomStay is performing at Omeo against Tarra Valley on the same dashboard.
The first full year on RoomStay shows each property moving the same direction, with the scale of the shift varying by park.
+401%
Increase in direct revenue at Mingling Waters
Direct bookings through the website grew 326% and direct revenue grew 401% year on year, adding an extra ~$44,000 in cashflow from the same website channel. It's the biggest percentage gain of the three parks and, notably, at the smallest property in the group.
+100%
Bookings doubled at Omeo Holiday Park in year one
In its first full year on RoomStay, Omeo Holiday Park booked 1,376 direct reservations worth $124,009, compared with 686 reservations worth $66,514 through the previous engine the year before. Bookings roughly doubled and revenue grew 86% from the same website channel.
+99%
Revenue nearly doubled at Tarra Valley Retreat
Tarra Valley moved from 428 reservations worth $64,864 on the old engine to 689 reservations worth $128,789 on RoomStay. Revenue grew 99% and reservations grew 61% in a single year.
− 4.7 pts
Booking.com's share of revenue at Mingling Waters
As RoomStay grew the direct channel, Booking.com's share of total property revenue dropped, even in cases where its absolute bookings crept up. Both direct revenue and total property revenue outpaced Booking.com's growth.
At Mingling Waters, Booking.com's share of total revenue fell from 15.8% to 11.1%, a drop of 4.7 percentage points. Total property revenue grew by 71% year on year, and most of that growth was captured direct rather than via the OTA. At Tarra Valley, Booking.com's share fell from 6.2% to 5.0%.
− 56%
Expedia reservations at Tarra Valley
Expedia bookings at Tarra Valley dropped 56% year on year as RoomStay launched and scaled. This is the clearest example across the group of guests choosing the direct path over an OTA when a strong direct option is available. The guests are still coming. They're just booking direct.
Reduced OTA commissions avoided across the group
Mingling Waters generated strong incremental direct revenue through Roomstay, avoiding the 15% in OTA commissions and additional expensive Virtual Credit Card processing costs that come with some OTA bookings.
Omeo and Tarra Valley saw similar gains, each driving additional direct bookings while sidestepping the same level of commission fees.
In total, had this incremental revenue instead flowed through global OTAs at roughly 15% commission, it would have cost the group approximately $24,880 in commission expenditure across the three parks.
Mobile-first booking flow for every accommodation type
Holiday park guests are often booking on the road, from a phone, on their way to the next stop. RoomStay's mobile-first flow lets them book powered sites, unpowered sites, cottages, bunkhouses, and glamping tents with the same ease, whatever device they're on. The inventory that was hardest to book through a legacy engine is now the easiest.
One dashboard for direct performance across the group
With all three parks reporting into the same RoomStay setup, Saltwater's head office can see which property is growing direct fastest, which OTAs are gaining or losing share, and where the next round of optimisation should focus. That visibility didn't exist on the old engine.
Guest data flowing back to the property
Every direct booking through RoomStay brings first-party data with it. That's the fuel for future repeat-guest campaigns and the kind of relationship OTAs never hand back.
“Our guests want a quick, clean way to book, and RoomStay gives them that. The booking experience feels like part of our brand now, not a hand-off to a third party. We're capturing more direct revenue, our teams have better visibility across the group, and the relationship with the guest stays with us.”
Luke Percival
Operations Manager, Saltwater Hotels & Resorts
Three things stand out from the Saltwater rollout that are worth other park operators thinking about.
What's next
With RoomStay now the direct booking layer across the group's holiday parks, hotels and resorts portfolio, Saltwater is focused on compounding the first-year result. That means rolling the same configuration across further properties in the portfolio, bringing more of the booking journey in-app with upsells and add-ons at checkout, and using the first-party data now flowing back through the direct channel to build repeat-guest campaigns.
Data source: RMS Property Management System export for Saltwater Hotels and Resorts Group, full-year 2024 against full-year 2025. Commission estimates based on a standard 15% OTA commission rate. Like-for-like channel comparison excludes Hipcamp, which launched on the Saltwater properties in 2025.
