Aidan Derwin, Front of House & Revenue Manager
The Challenge
The West Cork Hotel had no shortage of happy guests. What it lacked was a reliable way to hear from them.
Post-stay feedback was sparse. The guests who left reviews were rarely the most representative - they tended to be either very happy or very unhappy, with the quiet majority saying nothing at all. Loyal, repeat guests - the people who knew the hotel best and cared about it most - almost never left a public review. They just came back.
The result was a gap between the experience the hotel was delivering and the picture being painted online. Management had limited visibility into what guests actually thought, and no private channel through which guests could share honest feedback without it going straight to a public platform.
"There was no shortage of good intent. There was simply no infrastructure to capture it."
The Solution
In April 2025, the West Cork Hotel began working with I Left You A Note. Rather than a complex software integration, the setup was deliberately straightforward - no connection to the hotel's PMS was required.
Guest email lists are uploaded directly to the platform, and post-stay surveys go out automatically from there. The surveys are short and tailored to the hotel - a single scored question followed by an open text field. Guests who rate their stay five stars are prompted to share their experience on TripAdvisor. Guests who flag something are heard privately, giving the team insight they can act on without the feedback going public first.
In-stay feedback runs in parallel - a QR code in each room giving guests a private channel to raise anything during their stay, routed instantly to the relevant department.
All reviews - from every platform - are pulled into a single dashboard. AI-generated responses are drafted in the hotel's own brand voice, ready to send with minimal effort.
From conversation to live: a matter of days, not weeks.
The Results
Across every metric that matters to an independent hotel, year one delivered meaningful, measurable improvement.
| Metric | Result | Context |
|---|---|---|
| TripAdvisor score | 84.1 → 91.08 | +6.97 points in one year |
| TripAdvisor reviews | 39 → 65 | +67% volume increase |
| Five-star TripAdvisor reviews | 23 → 47 | More than doubled |
| OTA average score | 83.7 → 85.79 | +2.5% across all platforms |
| OTA reviews | 524 → 605 | +15.5% volume increase |
| Post-stay surveys completed | 203 | Score: 95.02 / 100 |
| Five-star surveys sent to TripAdvisor | 87 | Direct review pipeline |
| Gym day pass click-throughs | 75 | Upsell via guest portal |
| Offers click-throughs | 58 | Promotions via guest portal |
The TripAdvisor Effect
One of the most visible outcomes of year one was on TripAdvisor. Review volume increased by 67%. Five-star reviews more than doubled, from 23 to 47. The average rating moved from 84.1 to 91.08 - a near seven-point improvement in a single year.
The mechanism was straightforward. Guests who completed a post-stay survey and rated their stay five stars were prompted, in the same flow, to share their experience on TripAdvisor. The guests most likely to respond to a private survey are also the guests most likely to have had a genuinely positive experience. The platform routes that positivity towards the public platforms where it has the greatest commercial impact.
What They Learned
The numbers tell one story. The feedback behind them tells another.
Before I Left You A Note, the West Cork Hotel's picture of guest sentiment was built almost entirely from public reviews - a narrow, self-selected sample skewed towards the very happy and the very unhappy. The middle ground, where most guests sit, was largely silent.
That changed in year one. With 203 private post-stay surveys completed and a live in-stay feedback channel running alongside, the hotel began hearing from guests it had never heard from before - including loyal, repeat visitors who had strong opinions about the hotel but had never felt moved to share them publicly.
"We are hearing from guests we never heard from before. Loyal customers who have stayed with us for years. They are telling us things privately that we would never have seen in a public review - and that feedback has genuinely shaped how we run the hotel."
Aidan Derwin, Front of House & Revenue Manager, The West Cork HotelThe feedback was candid in a way that public reviews rarely are. Guests shared specific observations about rooms, service, food, and facilities - the kind of detail that helps a management team make real decisions. Over the course of the year, the team used that insight to shape their offering - adjusting, refining, and responding to what guests were actually saying rather than what a handful of TripAdvisor reviewers chose to share.
The nearly seven-point TripAdvisor improvement did not happen by accident. It happened because the hotel had access to new information, listened carefully, and acted on what it heard.
One Dashboard. Every Review. Responses in the Hotel's Own Voice.
Managing reviews across multiple platforms had always taken time. With I Left You A Note, every review - from TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Google, and beyond - is pulled into a single dashboard. AI-generated responses are drafted automatically in the West Cork Hotel's brand voice and tone, ready for a final check and send.
The result is faster response times, greater consistency, and significantly less time spent composing replies from scratch.