Reflections Holidays
Background
Reflections Holidays is Australia’s only social enterprise holiday park group, welcoming around two million day visitors and overnight guests each year. Across dozens of holiday parks and Crown reserves in coastal and inland New South Wales, Reflections reinvests profits into the Crown land it cares for on behalf of the people of NSW — measuring success through a quadruple bottom line of social, cultural, environmental, and economic outcomes.
Running parks across a large footprint comes with a simple reality: teams can’t be everywhere at once. And for guests, the most important moments aren’t complicated — they’re the ones that should “just work,” especially at the start of a holiday.
That’s why Reflections standardised entry and incident response on Verkada: to reduce arrival friction, give staff the visibility to respond faster, and create a foundation for new operating models across multiple sites — without adding complexity at every location.
The challenge: “Don’t let the boom gate ruin the holiday”
Reflections’ journey started with a customer experience problem, not a traditional “security upgrade.”
“People drive four hours on a Friday afternoon with kids in the back, and finally get to a holiday park… and then they get stuck at a boom gate. That was a critical moment on our customer journey that we wanted to go flawlessly,” says CIO Scott McShane.
Peak arrival windows — especially Friday afternoons and long weekends — could turn gate entry into a bottleneck. When one guest got stuck, the frustration spread down the entire queue.
At the same time, Reflections was operating across many locations with a lean team. The organisation wanted to scale without taking on the burden of maintaining more on-site infrastructure — and without relying on a small number of specialists to investigate issues after the fact.
What Reflections needed: an experience-first system that scales across parks
Reflections’ priorities centred on three things:
Make entry effortless for guests who have already paid — and keep exceptions manageable when something needs attention.
Give the right people the right access through enterprise-grade identity and permissions (including SSO and automated user provisioning).
Remove friction from investigations and operations, so frontline teams can answer their own questions quickly — without escalating every request to a central team.
“I didn’t want a system that was reactive, where only a handful of people had access to important information,” Scott says. “I wanted the right people to have the right access to the right information when they needed it, and to be empowered to answer their own questions.”
Why Verkada: from “sensor” to “insight” without on-site complexity
As Reflections evaluated options, Verkada stood out as a cloud-managed platform that could be deployed across sites without the overhead of designing separate storage, backup, and recovery infrastructure at each park — a key consideration for remote locations.
Just as crucially, Reflections saw Verkada as a way to move beyond “CCTV you look at later” and into a model where teams can act quickly in the moment.
“It’s removing the friction from someone being able to access the system, get the insight, and act,” says Scott.
How Reflections uses Verkada across parks
1) Smoother arrivals with boom gate automation and a better “happy path”
Access Control became the launchpad for Reflections’ deployment.
Reflections captures number plates for many guests during the online booking journey, supported by a pre-check-in step for those who haven’t provided details. For guests who need it, a fallback PIN can still be issued — but the goal is clear: if you’ve already paid, you should be able to arrive and enter without delays.
At the gate, Reflections pairs license plate recognition with intercom call handling so staff can quickly verify the driver, resolve exceptions, and remotely grant entry when needed — keeping queues moving during peak arrival periods.
In the first year of rollout, Reflections brought number plate reading and boom gate workflows live across more than a dozen parks, helping shift entry from a high-friction bottleneck into a smoother start to the stay.
“For anyone who’s already paid everything they need to pay, we just want them to flow straight through and start their holiday,” says Scott.
Because boom gates can create “chain reaction” frustration, Reflections monitors guest experience closely — including Net Promoter Score (NPS), which Scott describes as one of the organisation’s best indicators of customer experience. Reflections has modelled the revenue impact internally, estimating each NPS point is worth roughly $300K in annual top-line uplift. The team has found the arrival gate moment to be a consistent driver of detractor feedback, and early indicators suggest negative sentiment is lower at parks where the new experience is live. They’re still building the dataset to quantify the lift, but the trend is already moving in the right direction.
As Reflections continues to refine the arrival experience, capabilities like Verkada’s LPR Zones can also help the team understand vehicle movement and time-on-site across busy entry areas — turning everyday arrivals into operational insights that support staffing, compliance, and a smoother guest experience.
2) Intercoms that enable new operating models — including centralised after-hours support
Reflections uses Verkada Intercoms at front boom gates and, in some locations, front offices, giving teams the ability to speak with guests, resolve issues quickly, and experiment with centralised support after hours.
“The boom gate intercoms are allowing us to experiment with new operating models where we can centralise after-hours support and route the right kinds of enquiries to the right people,” says Scott.
This is especially valuable in a multi-site environment where the right person to solve a problem isn’t always standing at the gate — and where keeping service responsive matters just as much as keeping operations secure.
As Reflections continues to refine the arrival experience, new AI features for Intercom — like Live Translation and AI-Powered Voice Directory — can further streamline gate communication by reducing language barriers and routing visitors to the right person faster.
3) Cameras for incident response, risk management, and self-serve investigations
Reflections uses Cameras across both urban and remote sites to improve visibility during incidents and reduce the time it takes to answer “what happened?”
For risk management, video has been particularly valuable for clarifying events around gates and vehicle incidents, speeding up information sharing with insurers, and helping teams respond with better context.
Reflections also uses AI-powered search capabilities to help non-technical staff find what they need quickly — without waiting on a specialist.
One example: a park manager suspected a third-party cleaning contractor was not delivering the hours being billed. By searching relevant footage, the manager was able to validate the concern and renegotiate the agreement, delivering a meaningful annual saving for that park.
4) A real-time response to high-stakes incidents
Reflections’ team has also used Verkada to respond rapidly when time matters. AI-powered search lets staff use everyday, freeform language to quickly locate people or vehicles in footage — and then share what they find from mobile so teams can coordinate faster. That remote access is especially valuable across a dispersed footprint, where the right person to help isn’t always on site — but still needs to act quickly with real-time visibility.
At Norah Head Lighthouse, a child went missing. With immediate access to video — and the ability to narrow down footage using everyday descriptors, track movement across cameras, and apply granular filters for people and vehicles — an off-site staff member pinpointed where the child was last seen and which direction they went. From there, the team on the ground located the child safely within minutes.
5) Building new guest journeys on top of the platform (day passes and digital entry)
With a modern access platform in place, Reflections is now experimenting with ways to make lower-revenue, labour-intensive workflows far more efficient — without degrading the guest experience.
One example is the day-pass journey at certain inland parks: guests can scan a QR code, purchase a pass online, and trigger an access workflow that streamlines entry and reduces the need for staffing a gatehouse for short-stay visits.
Over time, Reflections sees opportunities to connect these access events to broader operational insights — like improving compliance, better understanding usage patterns, and creating incentives that encourage guests to book overnight stays.
6) A premium experience where technology stays in the background (Wilderluxe)
Reflections also operates a luxury offering designed around “disconnecting in nature.” At Wilderluxe, the goal is to keep the experience high-touch and the technology discreet.
Rather than a prominent boom gate, Reflections uses a subtle approach: a guest arrival moment that can be detected and surfaced to staff, enabling a more personalised welcome — while still supporting secure access to the accommodation and guest areas.
Reflections also uses cameras to better understand how guests use shared spaces, and to support compliance needs in areas like alcohol service — helping the team maintain standards without introducing unnecessary friction.
Governance and privacy: security by design in a hospitality environment
Across parks, Reflections places a strong emphasis on responsible deployment — especially in a family-oriented environment.
With SSO and automated user provisioning, the organisation can manage access systematically, using group-based permissions to ensure staff have the right level of visibility for their role — and reduce the risk of inappropriate or lingering access when someone changes roles or leaves the organisation.
Reflections also takes a privacy-conscious approach to where cameras are placed, focusing coverage on entry points and public areas while avoiding privacy-sensitive locations. Gate entry events — including license plate reads and intercom calls — create a consistent audit trail that supports incident reviews and insurance documentation.
The impact: less friction, more autonomy, and a foundation for innovation
For Reflections, the value of Verkada goes beyond traditional security outcomes. By making it easier for the right people to see what’s happening and act quickly, Reflections is improving guest experience, empowering frontline teams, and building a scalable foundation for future innovation.
“Most people don’t go to the bush to go camping in order to interact with technology. So having technology that gets out of the way has been really valuable for customers,” says Scott.
As Reflections expands its deployment, the team plans to continue building experiences on top of the platform — from new operating models for after-hours support, to smarter safety workflows in shared spaces, to more seamless guest entry across parks.