Enquiries arriving when the office is closed
Tuesday evening, Sunday afternoon, from the website form, from WhatsApp, from a referral email with no dates in it.
Industries
AI for tour operators and travel companies
The enquiry that arrives at 19:40 gets a real answer that evening instead of at nine the next morning, which is usually the difference between being the first quote read and the third.
Nothing goes to a traveller without you pressing send, and you keep the itinerary tool you already use. Send one enquiry you received this week and one supplier rate sheet to +27 73 932 6852 on WhatsApp and we will send back the draft that comes out of them.
01
What this does to a season
Quoting is the bottleneck in most small operations. One person writes the quotes, and the season caps out at how many that person can get through between everything else.
When the first draft is already built off your current rates, that person is editing instead of starting from a blank page and a hunt for the right PDF. Drafting stops being the thing that decides how many enquiries you can take on.
The other half is timing. An enquiry answered the evening it arrives is being read while everyone else is asleep, and the follow up happens whether or not anybody remembered it.
02
Where the hours go in a quoting week
Rebuilding the same itinerary
Rates sit in PDFs, they change by season, and every quote starts with finding the current sheet. Then the paragraph about the airport transfer gets typed again, slightly differently.
Chasing fourteen travellers
Passport copies, visa paperwork, dietary notes, rooming preferences, and the second deposit that was due last Friday. Three weeks out this is a full time job nobody was given.
The release period you forgot
A lodge holds space until a date buried on page four of a rate sheet, and nobody is watching that date.
03
The pieces that pay for themselves fastest
Enquiry to first draft
The message is read, the dates, party size, interests and budget come out of it, and a draft itinerary is built off your own rates in your own wording. It is logged where you keep your travellers, with a follow up date. You edit and send. Our quote from enquiry demo shows this running on sample data.
Supplier rate sheets read into one place
Next season's PDFs arrive from twelve lodges in twelve formats. They get read into a single sheet with the rate, the season, the child policy and the release period, so quoting stops being an archaeology exercise.
Traveller documents collected without the nagging
Each traveller gets one message listing exactly what is still missing for them, not a group email. When the passport photo comes back, the name, number and expiry are read into the rooming list and the supplier form. Outstanding deposits sit on the same screen as departures.
04
Answering at 19:40 without working at 19:40
Now
The enquiry sits until morning. You spend forty minutes on a quote for a traveller you know nothing about, using rates you had to go and find. Two days later you are not sure whether you followed up.
After
The traveller gets an acknowledgement within minutes, with the questions that make their next reply useful. The draft is waiting when you sit down. Thursday's follow up fires without you.
The part that wins the booking is still you. The part that steals your evening is not.
05
What it costs
Passport pages, visa forms and rate sheets are read, not sent for signature, so this is agent work. Implementation is free for a standard agent. A complex build is quoted before we start, so you see the number first.
Then a monthly subscription, priced by how much the agent does:
| What the agent does | A month |
|---|---|
| A simple agent: one job, one format, one destination | From R1,000 |
| A standard agent: several formats, your own rules, writing into two systems | From R2,500 |
| A heavy agent: high volume, many exceptions, several people relying on it | From R5,000 |
Worked example: forty travellers in a busy month with a passport page and a visa form each, plus thirty pages of new rate sheets, is about 110 documents across several formats, writing into your itinerary tool and your deposit sheet. That is a standard agent, from R2,500 a month.
The enquiry agent is priced the same way: free to put in when it is standard, then the tiers above, depending on how many places an enquiry can arrive from, how much the wording has to sound exactly like you, and how many rules there are about which traveller gets which property.
The subscription covers the agent running, the model costs, monitoring, and the changes when a supplier alters a rate sheet format or your rules change. Nothing extra to buy when something shifts. It is month to month, you own your data, and the process map stays yours.
Getting your inbox, itinerary tool and deposit sheet talking to each other is quoted per job, and you see the number before anything starts.
Passport pages, and who can see them
Your travellers' passports are the most sensitive thing in your business, and clients notice how you handle them.
You create the access yourself, in your own accounts, and you remove it in one click. For a travel setup that is usually a forwarding address for enquiries, one folder in the drive where traveller documents already live, and a user in your itinerary tool.
Documents stay in your storage. We do not copy passport pages into anything of ours and we do not keep a copy once a piece of work is finished. We have no reason to see card details or your supplier contracts, so we do not ask for them.
Being able to explain that to a client in one sentence is part of what you are buying.
07
How the first month goes
Twenty minutes on a call
You describe how a booking actually happens, from the first message to the traveller landing back home.
A screen share where we follow one enquiry
Screen share by default, wherever you are. We come in person when something has to be seen happening in the room, and we say so before, not after.
Get what you already use talking
Your inbox, your itinerary builder, the sheet where deposits are tracked, the place your travellers live. That side of the work is covered under integrations, and it takes hours out of a week before AI is anywhere near it.
Then one thing
Usually the first draft of an itinerary, sometimes the rate sheets, depending on how you sell.
Then the view
Departures in the next sixty days, documents outstanding, deposits unpaid, enquiries with no reply.
08
What stays with you
The itinerary that goes out. Travel is sold on judgement. You are the one who knows the family with a nervous flyer should not connect through two airports.
Visa advice. Requirements change by nationality, by consulate, by month. We will tell a traveller which documents are missing from their file. We will not build something that tells them whether they qualify.
The final name check. A passport name that does not match the ticket costs a trip. That check stays with a person on purpose, even though the reading is automatic.
Your supplier relationships. The rate you get from a lodge comes from years of sending them good clients.
One more thing worth saying before you spend money: if your enquiries already land in one place and you answer them the same day without losing any, getting your existing tools talking is worth more to you than any agent, and it costs a good deal less.
The numbers, in one place
- AI agents: free to put in when it is standard, complex quoted before we start.
- A standard agent (several formats, writing into two systems, like passport pages and rate sheets into your itinerary tool and deposit sheet) from R2,500 a month.
- A simple agent from R1,000 a month, a heavy agent from R5,000 a month.
- Getting your existing tools talking: quoted per job, and you see the number before anything starts.
Straight answers
Questions owners ask us
Only if you decide they should. The default is that AI drafts and you send. Most operators keep it that way for anything commercial and let it answer on its own only for simple things, like confirming a passport copy arrived.
No. You drop the new sheets in and the rates update. That is the reason we read the sheets rather than typing prices into a template that goes stale in April.
No. We build around the tools you keep. Replacing a system your team is comfortable with is the fastest way to lose them, so we do not start there.
Small operations often get more out of it, because the same person is quoting, chasing and doing the accounts. That is exactly the person whose evenings this gives back. At small volumes a simple agent from R1,000 a month is usually enough, and putting it in costs nothing, so ask us to run the sum on your numbers.
It keeps running, because it runs on your accounts and your storage, not ours. You own the system and its written documentation from the first week, so another developer can pick it up. We will name two we would trust with it if you ask.
The next step
Send one enquiry you received this week and one supplier rate sheet to +27 73 932 6852 on WhatsApp and we will send back the draft itinerary that comes out of them.
Or call the same number, email [email protected], or book twenty minutes and we will start with how you quote today.
Or email [email protected]. No slides, and no invoice for the conversation.