Wayfare is a South Island New Zealand tourism group comprising five leading brands: Cardrona Alpine Resort, Treble Cone, Go Orange, Real Journeys, and the International Antarctic Centre. Looking to reduce the frontline team's manual query load, Wayfare implemented Yonder's AI chatbot for the International Antarctic Centre.
Before Yonder, all International Antarctic Centre customer queries were managed in person or via Facebook Messenger by the social media team — consuming a large chunk of their time.
"Yonder chatbot is a great way to engage customers in a conversation at any time of the day. It's a 24-hour helpline service for our customers, allowing us to communicate back and forward with them instantaneously." — Rachel Fisk, Marketing Executive – Digital, Wayfare
By integrating Yonder with FareHarbor, the chatbot can answer with live availability and link customers directly through to book.
"Being able to integrate with FareHarbor is something we find pretty exciting. This integration means we have the ability to add in booking and live availability queries which takes it to that next level. The capability of the Yonder chatbot is definitely beyond any other chatbots that we've used in the past."
Approximately 10% of all chats click through to the booking system — a meaningful conversion contribution from a customer service tool.
Within 90 days of deploying Yonder, the International Antarctic Centre was getting 40 times more conversations than via Facebook Messenger alone. Questions like "Are you open?" and "What are your opening hours?" — previously flooding the customer support team — are now handled automatically.
"The benefits of Yonder have been twofold — from a customer experience perspective we're way more responsive, as the bot responds to customer queries straight away. We're also operating more efficiently — we've been able to free up time for our staff who were manually responding to all queries so now they're able to focus on other important parts of their roles." — Rachel Fisk
Chatbot users are satisfied — the word "thanks" appears unprompted in conversations approximately 22 times per month.
Conversation data helps identify what information is missing or unclear on the website.
"The questions that are being asked show if there's information that's just not clear on the website. Off the back of this, we update and make it easier for all website customers to find it and understand it."
The data also confirms customer priorities — like the popularity of deals and discounts — helping the team focus website and marketing effort where it counts most.