Phone, Email, & Chat: How to Deliver 24/7 Customer Service for Tourism

‍ You can flush your marketing money down the drain if you aren’t providing good basic customer service 24/7.

We live in an era where information is at travellers' fingertips — and their expectations have risen to match. Immediate answers aren't a nice-to-have anymore; they're the baseline. Fail to meet that expectation across any channel and you risk losing bookings to an operator who does. Here's how to tighten up your customer service across every touchpoint.

Email

Email remains a trusted and widely used communication channel — in 2018, more than 281 billion consumer and business emails were sent per day worldwide, and volume has only grown since. But for tourism businesses it has real limitations. We regularly hear from operators that emails pile up and can take anywhere from 6 hours to several days to clear. For a traveller asking about an experience that leaves tomorrow, that's simply too slow.

Email also carries the risk of low open rates (around 20%), spam filters, and messages getting buried — none of which are good for conversion.

How to improve your email customer service:

• Use a contact form rather than displaying your email address publicly. Apply a filter so contact form submissions land in a priority folder you check first — or remove your email address from your website entirely to route all enquiries through the form.
• Keep a clean inbox — once you've responded to an email, move it to a separate folder so unread emails always represent outstanding tasks.
• Short and fast beats long and late. A brief reply sent quickly is always better than a comprehensive one sent the following day.
• Use separate email addresses — one for customer enquiries, one for suppliers and admin — to keep your customer inbox focused and uncluttered.
• Connect customer emails to a CRM like HubSpot or Freshdesk to assign tickets, track conversations, and ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
• Set up an auto-reply that goes out the moment someone contacts you. Acknowledge their message, set expectations for response time, and point them to useful resources — your booking system, FAQ page, or AI Chatbot — while they wait. You could also include a reason why they should wait for your reply specifically.

Chat

Chat is the fastest-growing communication channel in the world. There are now over 2 billion users of messaging apps globally, and messaging apps consistently rank among the most-used apps on any device. Study after study shows chat is the preferred way consumers want to communicate with businesses — because of its speed, convenience, and accessibility. Many travellers now actively choose not to call.

For tourism operators, that means chat is no longer optional. Only around 35% of visitors will bother contacting you if there are barriers to chat — like being asked for an email address before they can even ask a question. Remove those barriers and engagement climbs significantly.

Yonder's AI Chatbot is purpose-built for tourism and handles up to 65–85% of common enquiries automatically — giving visitors immediate, accurate answers around the clock, while freeing your team for more complex conversations. Over 45% of chats happen outside of office hours, making 24/7 automation essential.

Best practices for chat:

• Respond within seconds, not minutes — even 5 to 15 minutes is too slow for a visitor who's ready to book
• Don't ask for an email address or name before someone can ask a question — it's a barrier that costs you conversations
• Add a chat widget to every page of your website, not just the homepage
• Integrate chat with your booking system so visitors can get live availability and book directly from the conversation

 Managing It All: The Yonder Unified Inbox

One of the biggest challenges in multi-channel customer service is fragmentation — conversations coming in from your website, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more, spread across different platforms and handled by different team members. Important messages get missed. Context gets lost. Nothing gets resolved efficiently.

Yonder's Unified Inbox solves this by bringing all your guest conversations into a single, centralised hub. Your team can view, manage, and respond to chats from every connected channel in one place — no switching between tabs, no dropped threads. You can star priority conversations so nothing gets lost, assign chats to specific team members to keep communication smooth across customer support, sales, and management, and work toward inbox zero with Yonder's pending and auto-close features.

Current integrations include website chat and Facebook Messenger, with Instagram, SMS, and WhatsApp either already live or coming soon — meaning your Unified Inbox will only become more powerful over time.

Phone

Phone remains a preferred channel for many tourism businesses — and Google reports it's still one of the most clicked elements in search results. It allows for a natural conversational flow and delivers a personal experience. But it has significant limitations: you can only serve one customer at a time, and our own research found that on average only 4 in 10 tourism businesses pick up the phone during opening hours. Every missed call is a potential missed booking.

Yonder's AI Voice Agent solves this entirely. It answers every call instantly — 24/7 — in a natural conversational voice, handling common questions about availability, pricing, and bookings without your team needing to lift a finger. No hold times, no voicemail, no missed enquiries.

If you're not yet using an AI voice agent, here are interim improvements worth making:

• Use a callback system so customers don't have to wait on hold
• Consider a duty phone for evenings to extend your coverage window
• When calls do go to voicemail, make sure the greeting is current, helpful, and directs callers to your website or chat for an immediate answer

Bringing It All Together

Across every channel — chat, phone, email, and social — the common thread is speed. Travellers who don't get immediate answers don't wait; they book elsewhere. The good news is you don't need a round-the-clock team to compete.

Yonder's AI Chatbot, AI Voice Agent, and Unified Inbox work together to cover your highest-volume channels automatically — delivering instant, personalised responses at any hour, across any platform, all managed from one place. And every conversation generates data you can use to improve your website, marketing, and overall customer experience.

Ready to see what 24/7 AI-powered customer service looks like for your business? Book a demo with Yonder.