Boat Bike Tours delivers tailored itineraries at scale with Agentforce.

Boat Bike Tours offers unique adventures across Europe that blend scenic guided bicycle rides with cozy accommodations and meals aboard one of their boats for 25,000 guests each year.

Manual processes made it difficult to keep up with evolving customer expectations.

For over 40 years, Boat Bike Tours has delivered unforgettable cycling and boating adventures across 16 European countries. Whether it’s leading a cycling group through Holland’s tulip fields or navigating a tall ship across the Baltic Sea, Boat Bike Tours has earned a reputation for exceptional service, tasty food, and expert tour leaders. 

As their number of guests increased each year, so did customer expectations for the speed of service. Today’s travelers expect more than just a trip — they want tailored options, quick responses to their questions, and the flexibility to adjust plans as they go. Boat Bike Tours’ 21-person support staff continually strived to meet and exceed these expectations, but their entirely manual processes weren’t built to support this level of service.

For example, if a customer requested a quote for a tour, a support staff member had to manually assemble it. That meant searching for available dates, finding the right tour package links, creating a PDF with all the details, and then attaching it to an email. Even though all of this information was stored in Data Cloud and Service Cloud, staff didn’t have a way to quickly find relevant details and turn them into a quote. This led to backlogs — especially when staff had to catch up after weekends.

"Many of the open cases are quote requests, typically about half of them,” said Laurens Winkel, CEO of Boat Bike Tours. “Being able to process these efficiently would greatly reduce stress, especially on Mondays when people come in, look at the screen, and think, ‘Oh no.’”

These manual processes caused delays and extra work for staff at every stage of the customer journey. Each detail — from dietary needs to special occasions — had to be checked by hand for each booking. For example, if a customer didn’t enter their height during booking, a staff member had to notice the information was missing and follow up with the customer via email so the correctly sized bicycle was ready for them. Instead of focusing on creating memorable experiences, staff spent valuable time chasing down information and following up on questions and requests.

Boat Bike Tours knew that to ensure seamless guest experiences from inquiry to adventure, they needed a way to automate these processes so their staff could focus on what they do best: arranging the hidden gems that make each trip memorable.

Real-time quoting and support from Agentforce will give staff more time to create incredible experiences.

Boat Bike Tours is turning to Agentforce — the agentic layer of the Salesforce Platform — to streamline their processes and build their 24/7 customer support solution. This digital workforce will handle everything from providing instant quotes to answering questions about tour options and assisting with bookings — no waiting or business-hour restrictions.

If, for example, a returning guest requests a quote for a “Mamma Mia!”-inspired tour of the Greek islands, Agentforce delivers instantly. Thanks to seamless integration with Data Cloud, Agentforce pulls from the live booking, pricing, and availability data stored in Boat Bike Tours’ Salesforce instance, finds the correct tour page URL from their website, and generates a quote in seconds. 

In this initial phase of their deployment, a member of Boat Bike Tours’ staff reviews each of Agentforce’s quotes before sending them to customers. In the coming months, Agentforce will autonomously handle the quotes process from start to finish while Boat Bike Tours builds out additional capabilities.

Because Agentforce can reason and take action across all of Boat Bike Tours’ Salesforce data and apps, Boat Bike Tours envisions building agents to help with a wide variety of traveler needs. If a prospective traveler can’t decide between touring Paris or Bruges, Agentforce will help them compare their options, answer their questions, and book their preferred tour. If the guest shares during booking that they have a food allergy but doesn’t specify what they’re allergic to, Agentforce will automatically send a WhatsApp message with a simple link to update those details, saving staff time and back-and-forth emails. 

“Agentforce will enable this team to focus on building deeper customer relationships and more personal connections, while also freeing them up to tackle other projects and continue innovating,” said Winkel.

When a guest needs help from a live rep, an omni-channel flow will make the handoff seamless no matter where the customer is reaching out – email, SMS, or via the website. Flows are no-code ways to automate business processes and direct Agentforce to take action based on set conditions. 

For example, if a guest contacts customer support to reschedule their trip at the last minute, the flow will instruct Agentforce to escalate last-minute reschedules to a live rep and include the context around the request. Agentforce’s seamless integration with Service Cloud means the contact is transferred along with a summary of the guest’s purchase history and their reason for contacting support. This empowers the rep to jump in right away and work with the guest to smoothly reschedule the tour. 

Agentforce will also save time for tour guides, who will be able to quickly access the route details, internal policies, and historical site info stored in their Experience Cloud knowledge base simply by chatting with Agentforce in Experience Cloud or Slack. Instead of spending an hour searching for details across multiple articles to prepare for a tour of the Aeolian Islands, guides will be able to ask questions like, “When was the last time the Stromboli volcano erupted?” and Agentforce will instantly provide answers based on Experience Cloud and public data — along with recommendations for local wineries known for growing their grapes in volcanic soil. “Agentforce will make our staff’s jobs more interesting by reducing repetitive tasks,” said Winkel. “It will make their lives better.”

With a projected 40,000 Agentforce conversations happening annually, Boat Bike Tours won’t just keep up with demand — they’re set to cruise ahead with smoother journeys for both guests and staff. “Agentforce will make us more competitive,” said Winkel. “Requests for quotes will be quicker and better. Our human reps will have more time to make a difference instead of wasting their time on repetitive tasks.”

Boat Bike Tours leads the way to environmentally friendly travel with Net Zero Cloud.

For Boat Bike Tours, preserving the planet is just as important as exploring it. That’s why they’re committed to cutting their carbon footprint and working toward net zero carbon emissions.

To make real progress, Boat Bike Tours uses Net Zero Cloud, Salesforce’s environmental, social, and governance solution, to track and manage their environmental impact. Net Zero Cloud gives them a full picture of their carbon emissions from direct fuel consumption to supply chain impact. With real-time data, they can make informed decisions and drive meaningful change.

One of their major steps forward was installing flow meters on 50% of their boat fleet to measure fuel and electricity consumption. These sensors feed that data directly into Net Zero Cloud, ensuring accurate, up-to-date emissions tracking. This data is combined with insights from Tableau, like guest count per ship and average fuel use per trip, to calculate total emissions with greater precision. In the future, Agentforce could enhance these efforts by helping guests explore the most sustainable tours or dig into what Boat Bike Tours is doing to reduce their carbon footprint.

Boat Bike Tours’ detailed tracking is just one piece of their broader commitment to sustainability. With an ambitious goal to cut their carbon footprint by 80%, they’re using Net Zero Cloud to gain crucial insights needed to drive tangible results. By reducing their environmental impact, they’re not just making a difference — they’re setting a new standard for the cleaner, greener future of travel.

After centralizing their service, emissions, and customer data with Data Cloud, Service Cloud, Net Zero Cloud, and mining insights across all this data with Tableau, adopting Agentforce was the logical next step for Boat Bike Tours. “Agentforce is a way of staying competitive, staying efficient,” said Laurens. “When you want to survive as a company, you cannot ignore technology.” 

Agentforce is part of Salesforce’s deeply unified platform, so Boat Bike Tours can build agents that take action on its unified data and existing workflows across Salesforce apps. Booking data, customer details, tour information, pricing, inventory, and guide information are all unified in Data Cloud, enabling Agentforce to take action on a complete view of each guest and tour. “There’s not a lot of our data outside of Salesforce,” said Winkel. “The source is Salesforce, which is a great advantage for us.”

Whether a customer needs a quote, help exploring different tour options, or assistance with their scheduled trip, Agentforce will be able to deliver real-time answers without delay. “The expectations of our guests in terms of service are increasing every year,” said Winkel. “The value in the end is all about the service level that is being increased by quicker response times with Agentforce.”

With the Salesforce Platform bringing all their data together and Agentforce turning that data into action, Boat Bike Tours is ready to deliver exceptional service that sets them apart in the competitive travel industry.