HX charts a bold new course in travel support with Agentforce.

From the Galápagos to Antarctica, luxury expedition travel brings complex challenges — and sky-high expectations.

HX has over 130 years of experience providing once-in-a-lifetime adventures. From following the march of penguins in Antarctica to strolling alongside giant tortoises in the Galápagos, it’s become a leader in expedition travel. Following its separation from the Hurtigruten Group in 2024, HX is charting a new course as a successful standalone business, building a dedicated organization focused solely on expedition cruising. 

Unlike port-to-port cruising, expedition travel involves multi-leg journeys, remote destinations, and countless customer touchpoints before, during, and after the trip. This shift brings a fresh technology strategy: designing systems, teams, and processes from the ground up, tailored to the unique challenges of these extraordinary journeys. 

“We have about 200 expedition schedules and five ships, so the permutations are quite big,” said Louise Mackinlay, SVP of Digital and IT. “We want data on the expeditions and vessels to be at our guest experience teams' fingertips.” 

Customers invest a significant amount of time and money into these trips, so they expect white-glove service and instant answers — from packing tips to sorting last-minute travel hiccups. And HX travel consultants handle more than 110,000 calls a year, with calls routed through separate systems that previously didn’t always share context. To provide high-quality service, guest experience reps had to juggle multiple platforms to get the full picture, which took time.

With a loyal customer base — around one-fifth of customers are repeat voyagers — HX sees long-term potential in increasing lifetime value. “We want to make sure that customers are kept engaged — from lead to booking to boarding time,” said Peter Hill, CRM Strategic Journey Planner. “We want them excited, fully informed, and ready for their life-changing trip.” 

As it differentiates its business from Hurtigruten, HX is reimagining its service model to better support high-value travelers while staying true to its mission: to explore more, champion sustainability, and elevate what expedition cruising can be.

Agentforce equips HX’s teams with real-time answers, helping them provide seamless customer service to their voyagers.

HX’s commitment to high-touch service starts with its own teams. They navigate vast amounts of information to manage bookings, as well as unpredictable situations like flight delays, which can stop an en-route traveler from getting to their ship before it departs. “Our guest experience teams have to be an expedition team in their own right,” said Louise Mackinlay.

To enable employees to provide best-in-class service faster, HX implemented Agentforce, AI agents powered by the Agentforce 360 Platform. This acts as a rep assistant to quickly surface relevant knowledge and suggest next steps. Guest experience reps can start a chat with Agentforce in Agentforce Service and ask questions in conversational language. Agentforce quickly delivers the information reps need, drafts email replies, and helps reps quickly and accurately analyze call transcripts — all based on unified data. 

For example, if a customer asks what they should pack for a 23-day Antarctic expedition, a guest experience rep can ask Agentforce. In seconds, Agentforce pulls the most up-to-date packing guidelines from Salesforce Knowledge via Data 360 — including destination-specific gear and climate notes — and replies with the details the rep needs to respond to their traveler. 

Instead of manually searching through internal PDFs or databases while the customer is on hold, reps get quick, accurate answers in seconds. This digital assistant frees up HX’s teams to focus on more personalized, high-value interactions and complex travel assistance. 

HX provides always-on answers with Agentforce — with a bold vision for smarter, multilingual expedition guidance ahead.

In addition to supporting internal teams, HX built an autonomous FAQ agent named Finn to deliver instant answers to common questions on its website that don’t require human support. 

Drawing on 190 articles in Salesforce Knowledge and content from the website, Agentforce instantly answers nuanced questions like “What shoes do I need to step foot on Antarctica?” or “Tell me everything I need to know about expedition travel”.  In natural language, Finn can tell travelers that rubber boots are mandatory in Antarctica (and available on loan, free of charge and bio-securely cleaned). It can explain what to expect from an expedition in easy-to-read bullet points, and it provides relevant links for further reading. 

Travelers get all the information they need and the opportunity to learn more without feeling overwhelmed. Meanwhile, it frees up HX reps to focus on complex customer needs while offering guests convenient and intelligent self-service options. 

To get ready for the future, HX is currently expanding its knowledge base to cover destination-specific insights, making complex expedition details even simpler and more accessible. It has also broadened Agentforce’s reach with multilingual support to connect more effectively with travelers around the world. And it’s even piloting Agentforce in its booking funnel to drive sales conversations, seamlessly passing qualified leads to live expedition travel specialists.

“We’ve made the first steps to bring everything into Salesforce,” said Louise Mackinlay. “It’s still early with Agentforce, but with all the possible use cases across the unified platform, our teams are getting very excited about what’s possible.”

When HX split from its parent company, it chose to stay with the Agentforce 360 Platform without even looking at competitors. “With Salesforce we’ve found you can start small — and if you want to scale it up, it will work,” said Louise Mackinlay. “When we saw AI talking to both customers on our website and our guest experience team and connecting the two together, we thought, ‘Wow, that could be really powerful for us.’” 

HX isn’t just selling vacations — it’s creating once-in-a-lifetime journeys to some of the most remote places on Earth. To match that level of ambition, it needed more than just a basic CRM. It chose Salesforce because no other solution could bring together all systems, data, teams, and AI-powered workflows on one deeply unified platform. Salesforce connects every part of the business, from sales to marketing to customer service, so HX can deliver experiences as seamless as the trips it offers.