How YHA Australia Turned Guest Feedback Into Operational and Capital Decisions Across 18 Properties

GUEST EXPERIENCE

YHA Australia uses the TrustYou Customer Experience Platform (CXP) to run a single reputation program across its national hostel network, moving from fragmented, platform-by-platform monitoring to a single, trend-aware view that informs everything from daily review responses to multi-year capital investment.

Why it matters: YHA Australia's TrustYou Score rose from 84 to 86 year on year. The shift: from reactive, fragmented feedback monitoring to a single trend-aware view, used daily by Operations, Property Managers, and Front Office teams, and feeding group-level training, staffing, and capital decisions.

YHA Australia runs 18 properties across Australia, from city transit hostels to eco-lodges. Reviews from across the portfolio flow into one platform, scored against the TrustYou Score and the Reputation performance Score (RPS), so teams can compare like-for-like, property to property, period over period.

Top 3 Core Objectives: Before TrustYou, reviews were scattered across multiple platforms, which made it hard to track trends, respond consistently, or see the network as a whole.

One trusted reputation KPI: For a quality function overseeing 18 sites, the work was reactive, monitoring platform by platform. The team needed one trusted reputation KPI across the whole network.
Compare property performance: The team needed a way to see which properties were leading and which needed support.
Turn feedback into action: The team needed a structure that turned feedback into action, rather than leaving it to be reviewed in isolation.

Innovators Mentioned

YHA Australia

TrustYou

Natasha Havansky

Quality Manager, YHA Australia

YHA Australia

"We've used several years of TrustYou feedback to inform a property-level HVAC capital decision, ensuring investment is directed at the guest-experience gaps the data clearly supports."

Natasha Havansky

Quality Manager, YHA Australia

👍 Quality Manager, YHA Australia Natasha Havansky said that YHA Australia used several years of TrustYou feedback to direct a property-level HVAC capital investment to the guest-experience gaps the data supported.:

"We've used several years of TrustYou feedback to inform a property-level HVAC capital decision, ensuring investment is directed at the guest-experience gaps the data clearly supports."

⚖️ The selection process: During their research process, Natasha Havansky evaluated TrustYou's product differentiators, customer support, and holistic value as a strategic partner and ultimately decided that TrustYou was the best fit solution:

Quality Manager, YHA Australia Natasha Havansky said, about their decision: "It's a genuinely valuable tool if you're serious about managing guest experience at scale. The biggest benefit isn't collecting feedback; it's being able to consistently act on it, track sentiment in a meaningful way, and tie investment and training decisions back to what guests are actually telling you across every property. The onboarding and support experience has also been strong, which matters when you're embedding a tool this deeply into your operating rhythm."

📈 The results: Reputation scores have trended positively since TrustYou was embedded into the group's processes. At the property level, sentiment and review data guide daily improvements and staff coaching, and at the group level, the same data shapes training priorities and capital expenditure.

A positive, sustained performance trend: the group's TrustYou Score has risen from 84 to 86 year on year, alongside improvements in rooms and cleanliness sentiment, with several properties delivering consistent RPS gains period on period.
Data-led capital and staffing decisions: YHA Australia drew on several years of TrustYou feedback to inform a property-level HVAC capital investment, and uses persistent sentiment patterns in a category to trigger targeted recruitment or training.
Faster, more consistent guest engagement: bringing every review stream into one place has made response management significantly easier and strengthened accountability, with Property Managers responsible for closing out the action items from each review cycle.