Every year, Preston Palace, a unique all-inclusive family resort in the Netherlands, operates at an exceptional 96% occupancy rate. With a long tradition of delivering memorable guest experiences, the resort has built its reputation on consistency, warmth, and quality.

With around 500,000 guests each year, including day visitors and overnight guests, keeping standards high across every area requires more than intuition. Listening to guest feedback is essential, but understanding what is truly relevant among such a large volume of comments can be challenging. How do you know whether a single complaint reflects a broader sentiment or is simply an isolated voice?

For the past 12 years, Preston Palace has relied on Customer Alliance as its central platform to collect, organise, and act on guest feedback. The Review Stream brings all reviews together in one place, surveys provide structured insights directly from guests, and the AI Reply Assistant helps the team respond efficiently and consistently.

Beyond these daily efficiencies, Customer Alliance also gives Preston Palace the clarity to base both operational and strategic decisions on real guest sentiment rather than assumptions. This insight has supported some of the resort’s most meaningful improvements in recent years, including the renovation of all 324 rooms, a refreshed food presentation concept, and the installation of a new swimming pool slide. It also ensures every team member can understand feedback quickly and act on it with confidence.

What follows is the story of how Preston Palace uses structured guest feedback not only to maintain excellence, but to continuously evolve, with guests at the centre of every decision.

Key achievements

• Renovated 324 hotel rooms after Customer Alliance data revealed a multi-year decline in room satisfaction
• Raised cleanliness satisfaction from around 7/10 to just over 8/10, aligning with room renovations and operational improvements.
• Increased Room CSAT to 8.03 on a 10-point scale in 2025, the highest score in five years
• Identified strong guest demand for additional pool activities, leading to the installation of a new swimming pool slide
• Improved food presentation and temperature based on structured guest comments, contributing to a Breakfast CSAT of 9.0 on a 10-point scale in 2025
• Reduced service-related complaints by uncovering peak-time pressure points and launching targeted, app-based staff training

About Preston Palace

Preston Palace is a long-established all-inclusive family resort with one of the most extensive facility offerings in the region. The property features 324 hotel rooms, a subtropical swimming paradise, an indoor funfair, ten bowling lanes, multiple themed restaurants, live shows, and dedicated entertainment teams for both children and adults.

The resort has been awarded Family Hotel of the Year multiple times, reflecting its strong commitment to family-focused hospitality and full-service experiences that attract guests of all ages. With its own in-house technology development and continuous investment in innovation, Preston Palace blends tradition with forward-looking operational excellence.

The challenge before Customer Alliance

Before partnering with Customer Alliance more than a decade ago, Preston Palace faced a challenge familiar to any large, experience-rich resort: understanding guest sentiment at scale. With thousands of reviews coming through different channels, a wide range of facilities, and diverse guest segments, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish isolated comments from meaningful patterns.

Feedback was collected in multiple formats, including paper forms left in hotel rooms, but the insights were scattered, inconsistent, and time-consuming to analyse. Ryan Dingjan, Project Coordinator and Revenue Manager, who has been with Preston Palace for almost 25 years, experienced this firsthand. Without a centralised system, the team lacked a reliable way to identify trends early or use feedback to support strategic decisions.

What Preston Palace needed was a structured, data-driven approach that allowed them to see the full picture of guest sentiment, not just fragments of it.

The solution with Customer Alliance

Preston Palace adopted Customer Alliance to centralise all guest feedback, combining reviews from multiple OTAs and portals with structured survey responses in one platform. The Review Stream brought every comment into a single, organised view, while Customer Alliance surveys enabled the collection of targeted insights directly from guests.

For the first time, the team could work with consistent, real-time data rather than fragmented impressions. Guest feedback became a reliable decision-making tool, guiding both daily operations and long-term improvements.

“Thanks to the data from Customer Alliance we can respond quickly to facts and not assumptions. When someone hears a negative story or staff sense a problem, they turn to Customer Alliance to see whether it is a pattern “living among our public” or just a one-off.’’, said Ryan Dingjan, Project Coordinator and Revenue Manager.

This workflow powers their daily routines. Colleagues reply to reviews, identify recurring mentions in the Review Stream, and validate any emerging concerns with insights from surveys and dashboards. When a chef feels something is changing in the restaurant experience, or when a manager senses a shift in service perception, Customer Alliance provides the clarity to confirm whether there is a real trend and for which guest segments.

This approach has guided some of Preston Palace’s most meaningful improvements, not by prompting unnecessary spending, but by making it clear where action would have the greatest impact on guest satisfaction, ratings, and revenue. Customer Alliance helps the resort prioritise confidently and invest resources where they matter most. In a world where every hotelier must choose carefully where to invest time and effort, Preston Palace does so with a data-informed view guiding every step.

Renovating 324 rooms after identifying a clear decline in guest satisfaction

Using Customer Alliance’s Analytics Report, Preston Palace could clearly see that room satisfaction had been declining for several years. What initially looked like minor fluctuations revealed a consistent downward trend that was starting to influence related categories, including hygiene, price perception, and the overall rating.

As Ryan Dingjan, Project Coordinator and Revenue Manager, explained:

“We saw the room rate declining… and because of this we saw the overall rate go down.”

Using the survey data and long-term CSAT insights in Customer Alliance, Ryan and the management team were able to demonstrate that this was not a temporary fluctuation but a structural issue. . The platform made the trend visible, measurable, and actionable, helping leadership understand that renovation was not optional but necessary to protect satisfaction and revenue.

Renovation began in May 2024, and by late 2025 all 324 rooms had been fully updated. As Ryan described them, the new rooms now have a “very warm and cozy feeling.”

The improvement is visible in the room CSAT:

As Ryan Dingjan summed it up:

“It was a downward trend and now it’s better than 2022. Customer Alliance helps us stay connected with our guests. We keep listening and learning and improving from what people say, and it really works.”

Food and restaurant experience: how guest perceptions led to a complete service refresh

Through Customer Alliance, the team began to notice consistent feedback about two issues in the buffet restaurant: some dishes were not warm enough, and the food seemed “always the same.” It was only by analysing patterns in Customer Alliance’s Review Stream, where feedback from all OTAs and portals is centralised, that the team could see how frequently these themes appeared.

Operationally, the menu was varied, but the presentation stayed identical each day, which created the perception of sameness.

As Ryan Dingjan explained:
“Guests often mentioned that the food was cold or always the same… They said it was always the same but that’s not true. So we saw that we needed to do something about our food presentation.”

By seeing this pattern clearly across many comments, the team could pinpoint the real cause and address it with confidence. Preston Palace introduced a new heat bridge, redesigned the presentation concept, and adjusted operations to protect both temperature and perceived variety.

As Preston Palace’s Revenue Manager shared:

“Now we have a new heat bridge and a new presentation in our restaurant. It opened about a month ago and now we’re going to follow the reviews on Customer Alliance if they’re getting better.”

These changes helped reinforce one of the resort’s strongest categories, with breakfast now achieving an average CSAT of around 9.0 on a 10-point scale.

Family facilities: how guest feedback sparked the decision to install a swimming pool slide

For years, families casually mentioned wanting a slide in the swimming pool. Individually, these comments sounded like wish-list items. But when Preston Palace reviewed the data in Customer Alliance’s Review Stream, the pattern was unmistakable: the request appeared multiple times, across different guest segments, and throughout the year.

As Ryan Dingjan described:

“When you read one comment about a slide, it’s cute. But when you see it 40, 50, 60 times in your dashboard, you realise it’s a need, not a wish.”

With the pattern unmistakable, Ryan and the team presented the insights to management.
As she explained:

“Before seeing the data we weren’t sure if it was necessary. But we investigated all the reviews on Customer Alliance and we showed the management how many times people mentioned the slide… now we have a slide.”

What began as scattered comments became a strong investment case once the scale of the feedback became visible. Today, the new slide is one of the most appreciated additions for families.

Wellness and spa: how continuous monitoring helps preserve a top-performing strength

Customer Alliance also enables Preston Palace to protect what guests already love. Wellness and spa consistently perform among the resort’s strongest categories. Through category reporting and ongoing sentiment monitoring, the team can spot early shifts in perception and ensure standards remain high.

Continuous monitoring is not only about identifying weaknesses. It is equally about safeguarding excellence, and Customer Alliance helps Preston Palace maintain the consistency guests return for.

Why It Works: strategy, technology, and people connected

For Preston Palace, the value of Customer Alliance goes far beyond any single feature. It lies in how the platform connects daily operations with long-term strategy. Collecting and replying to reviews efficiently is essential for a resort of this scale, and Customer Alliance gives the team a way to manage a high volume of feedback without losing time or consistency.

Equally important is the clarity the platform provides. With one central source of truth, the team can analyse what guests are saying, understand which themes are affecting key satisfaction scores, and identify where attention or investment will have the most impact.

As Ryan Dingjan, project coordinator and revenue manager, explained:

“It makes us combine the strategy and the technology with the connection with the people.”

Customer Alliance helps the team achieve this by providing:

Clarity – seeing whether an issue is isolated or widespread
Context – understanding how different guest segments (families, couples, elderly guests) perceive the experience
Confidence – using data to justify renovations, upgrades, or operational changes
Continuity – creating a structured, ongoing way to listen, learn, and improve

And while the platform provides the structure, Preston Palace also highlights the importance of the human support behind it. Ryan praised the quality of communication with Customer Alliance’s customer success team, who proactively helped them set up a survey, explore new features, and think ahead.

As she put it:

“It’s very nice to sometimes have a chat with Customer Alliance’s team about where you want to go, how we can provide you with information to make some things on your platform better. Normally with a big platform like this, it’s not that you have so much deep contact with the partners.”

This combination of technology, strategic clarity, and close support is what makes Customer Alliance a long-standing part of Preston Palace’s improvement culture.

The takeaway

Preston Palace shows how powerful a guest experience operation becomes when feedback is not only analysed strategically, but also managed consistently in day-to-day routines. Customer Alliance supports the team at both levels: it streamlines the essentials, distributing reviews, sending survey invitations, collecting structured feedback, and replying efficiently through AI Reply, while also providing the deeper insights needed for long-term decisions.

This combination of operational efficiency and strategic clarity allows Preston Palace to stay closely connected to its guests, understand shifts in sentiment early, and act with confidence. It gives them the structure to manage feedback at scale and the intelligence to prioritise what matters most.

Want one platform to collect reviews, run surveys, and understand your guest feedback clearly? Book a demo and talk to our team to understand how your hotel can benefit from Customer Alliance.