Saco River Tubing: The Busiest Booking Channel Nobody Was Measuring

In July 2026, Yonder's AI Voice Agent answered 4,806 calls for Saco River Tubing. The callers behind them booked 950 trips, put 4,334 guests on the river and delivered a 92x return on the monthly Yonder subscription.

Running a river outfitter means the phone starts ringing the moment the sun comes out.

At Saco River Tubing Center and Saco Canoe Rental Company near North Conway, New Hampshire, floats, tubes, canoes and kayaks go out on the water all summer long. A lot of those trips start with a phone call.

For a watersports operator with a short, busy season, every missed call can mean a missed booking.

The Challenge: Group Trips Planned by Committee

River trips are rarely booked by one person alone. One person calls to check availability, then a few more from the same group call back with their own questions before anyone actually books.

That means the phone doesn't ring once per booking. It rings several times, often during peak rush when the crew is busy getting guests onto the river, and after hours when the front desk has closed.

Every Call Answered, Day or Night

Saco River Tubing activated Yonder's AI Voice Agent to make sure every one of those calls got answered, whether the office was fully staffed or the crew was out on the river.

Always-on coverage: The AI answered calls instantly, all day and through peak rush, including the hours the front desk was closed.

Built for group bookings: Because trips are so often planned by committee, the agent was ready to help whoever in the group called next, not just the first person to dial in.

Zero added staff time: Calls the AI handled start to finish freed the team to focus on running trips instead of running the phone.

The Outcome

One Month of Peak Season With Yonder
1 July to 31 July 2026

Over the course of July 2026, Saco River Tubing matched every caller's phone number against its reservation system to see exactly what the phone line was producing. The result: the phone wasn't overhead. It was one of the business's biggest booking channels.

The results in July were immediate and measurable.

• 4,806 calls answered instantly, day, night and through peak rush
• 904 unique callers became booking customers in the month
• 950 bookings and 4,334 guests on the river came from customers who called first
• 34.7% of callers booked within days of calling, the strongest booking rate Yonder tracks
• 18% of every booking in July, across all channels, followed a phone call
• 141 call-connected group bookings of 8+ guests, totaling 1,738 guests
• 41 bookings came from calls placed after the desk had closed
• 63 hours of phone conversations handled without pulling staff away from guests
• A 92x return on the monthly Yonder subscription in a single month

For a seasonal operator, that's not a marginal improvement. It's a phone line doing the work of several extra staff members, every day of the summer.

The busiest channel nobody was measuring.

Before this, the phone line was easy to take for granted. It never showed up in a booking channel report the way ads or the website did, yet nearly one in five bookings across the entire business, on every channel, followed a call.

Group trips leaned on it especially hard. Whoever in the party called first got an instant answer, and it often took only one more call from someone else in the group before the trip was booked.

What's next

Saco River Tubing's July numbers came from a dedicated phone-match study. That same level of reporting is being built directly into the next version of Yonder's AI Voice Agent, so operators can see phone-driven bookings as a standard part of their regular reporting, not a one-off project.

Book A Demo!

Ready to see what your own phone line is really doing? Book a demo with Yonder.